


The Dancer of Hafiz

by Stephen_Wormwood



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dark, Dark Fantasy, Gay, Gay Male Character, Gay Sex, M/M, Male Slash, Original Character(s), Sex Work, Sexual Content, Slash, Slavery, Supernatural Elements, Violence, eastern fantasy, m/m - Freeform, sword and sorcery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:47:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 10
Words: 52,110
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23756389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stephen_Wormwood/pseuds/Stephen_Wormwood
Summary: In the ancient and bloody sands of the High East, a young man named Abana was once sold into slavery and exploited by evil men. Two years have passed since his escape and he burns for vengeance against his former master, no matter who he has to kill or cheat or sleep with. But how did it all begin? And what will the path of vengeance cost him...?
Relationships: Abana/Maliq
Comments: 7
Kudos: 13





	1. A Diamond in the Dung Heap

(Late Winter, 1179)

The Tehraqis had a crude term for copulation. They called it _riding the camel_ – predictably garish for a city-state of stargazers, merchants, and cutthroats. The Kushwaris on the other hand, at least those of a certain breeding and social stock, they knew it by a much more elegant name – the Dance of Flesh.

How many years had Abana of Hafiz danced? How many partners had he danced with? It galled him to admit that he lost count many, many dances ago. He barely even remembered their names – but he remembered their faces. The mole-eyed boy and the jowly spearman; the fat merchant and the pale-skinned guildsman; the nervous bookkeeper and the gold-toothed baker; the lord’s minstrel and the exiled chieftain. The drunk charioteer. The one-armed executioner. The governor’s sons. All had had their turn in countless times and contexts. He hated them. And he would never forget any of them. Maybe their names… but never their faces.

Cruel men made Abana dance before he even knew what dancing was. Cruel men tempered him like steel to cater to their ilk, to crave their touch, to covet spilt seed like some precious reward – and the cruellest man of all nearly succeeded.

Abana learned to hate the dance.

The pain of it, the shame of it, the sweat and the smells, the moans and the growls; the unwanted ecstasy you clung to like flotsam to moor you through it. Abana thought he might _always_ hate the dance... if not for the man he danced with now.

Maliq.

It was as though the gods sculpted a man from finest marble and brought him to life by the breath of their essence – solely for Abana’s sake. The boy adored every inch of the man; his hair like thick ebon whorls, his deep jade eyes and smooth bronze skin, those broad shoulders and muscular frame… and his unflinchingly kind heart.

Yes, Abana had no idea how wonderful the Dance of Flesh could truly be until he chose Maliq as his partner. And he was so lost in the dance that lusty night (in one of the many cushioned tents of Dhabr’s caravan) that he almost missed the little spy peeling back the curtain door and poking an inquisitive eye inside. Abana watched the spy as the spy watched him bounce up and down off Maliq’s thick hips and all eight inches of his girth. And then Abana smiled at him.

The boy blushed and ran away.

So far as anyone knew Maliq was only his guard, and until they reached Tehraq, that was the way it had to remain.

 _‘I’m going to have to kill you, little one,’_ thought Abana. _‘But not until I finish my dance…’_

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

There were so few things in Abana ibn Tawab’s life that he could genuinely take pride in. His family’s possessions were few and his own even fewer. They had next to nothing of value… except the sword.

_Jahanshah_ , they called it, and it was the pride of their family. With a thin and curving blade wrought from crucible steel and a hilt of glittering gold its beauty was completed by the blood red ruby set in its pommel. Both the blade and the scabbard were tightly spell-woven – only members of their bloodline or their loved ones could draw it.

Polishing Jahanshah was the only chore Abana liked. With tender care he took his cloth and wiped the scabbard from locket to crest, then latched his fingers around the grip and with one pull unsheathed its curved single edge. The boy stopped a moment to admire it (as he always did). Abana polished it until his impish reflection stared back at him with awe. Jahanshah once belonged to his grandfather Fouzan ibn Mushegh; an anointed paladin who served under King Gurkhan II as governor of the Nyssinian borderlands. At the height of his power Fouzan commanded nearly 40,000 troops and resoundingly repelled the Great Trident: a three-pronged invasion by the northern paleskins. From tent to tavern, whether dusk or dawn, they sung his grandfather’s name across the High East. He was a hero.

And then, on the final night of his victory march to the royal court at Tehraq, Fouzan disgraced himself by bedding one of the king’s paramours.

Execution normally followed such treason but King Gurkhan was wise – killing the popular Governor of Nyssinia so soon after his colossal victory over the paleskins would incite the entire High East – so instead he chose the ‘merciful path’ and exiled him to the blustery pastures of Kushwar. Stripped of his titles and wealth (but most of all his honour) the old soldier did not take kindly to the quaint rigours of rural life. He died fewer than two years into his banishment – of a broken heart according to family legend.

_‘Temptations of the flesh’_ , said his mother once. _‘That is what killed Fouzan’_. 

And then his mother screamed.

Panicked, Abana quickly returned Jahanshah to its rack and sprinted into the next room, whipping the moth-eaten azure curtains out of his way to find his mother, Paja, fallen over by the cooking pit. The pot of broth she’d brought to boil had overturned along with her and sat half-spilt over the sandstone floor.

“Mama,” Abana helped her back onto the wooden stool she’d been seated on. When made to sit upright she stiffened ever so slightly, as if her back hurt. “Are you alright? What happened?”

With a long wince Paja straightened out the veil around her hair and shoulders as though nothing had happened. _‘Composure is the essence of a noblewoman’_ , or so went her mantra… but she had lived by it long since her father’s fall from grace. “Thank you, my child. The winds merely took my breath a moment. I am fine.” 

That was when he noticed the bruising.

Patches of grape-coloured flesh around her left eye and jaw. Red welts around her wrists and elbows. No doubt his father Tawab gave her another beating the night before – her third in the last ten days – but Abana could only swallow his displeasure with frowning silence. It was not a son’s place to question his father’s judgement.

But she didn’t have to cook alone. Maybe half the broth was gone but a meal could still be salvaged.

“Stay off your feet, Mama,” said Abana. He quickly set things to rights. First by hauling the heavy iron pot back onto the stone nooks overhanging the spit, then by sweeping up the remnants of the spillage. After that he took Paja’s gourd spoon to the adjacent pantry where they kept their small supply of spices and vegetables in cold clay jars arrayed around its curved wall. Though many were empty Abana found just enough turmeric, cumin and garlic to make a soup. All he left his mother to do was grind up some herbs with her mortar and pestle.

Paja smiled to herself as her son attentively stirred the pot. “You are a good boy, Abana. Sometimes, I-”

“ABANA!”

The boy, the mother and the gourd spoon all froze. Both were far too familiar with _that_ roar. It was Tawab – and he was furious about something. If he kept his father waiting, then he’d put his fists back into action before the sun fell.

The boy sighed. 

“Wait here, Mama,” he said. “I will be back.”

Abana left her to grind the herbs alone as he made off through the rear door and walked out onto the pebbled grass surrounding their homestead. Tawab ibn Shabab stood a few yards away at the gate of their goat paddock, as still as a temple idol. Cold morning winds bit at Abana’s skin as he walked to his father’s side. Something had rattled him hard.

“ _Baba_?” Abana shivered, “Is everything alright?”

Tawab didn’t blink. “Open your eyes, boy.”

He did as his father asked and saw it for himself… that the goats were dead. All fifty of them, the whole herd, strung out across the paddock in lifeless heaps of three of four, their teeth skinned back and speckled with foam and gouts of cud. They hadn’t been killed. It was as if some disease suddenly struck over the course of the night and cut them down where they stood.

But how was that possible?

Tawab’s fists clenched so tight his knuckles turned white.

“This… this is the end of us,” he said. “We’re finished…”

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

Between his lilac-dyed veil and the dim patch of shade provided by the tasselled velvet parasol attached to his camel’s saddle; nothing overwhelmed the constant and oppressive heat that so defined the land Abana of Hafiz knew as the High East, even in this, the equivalent of its winter season.

Tehraq was close.

The dancer slipped a hand beneath his veil and mopped up his brow with one of the silk cloths he’d taken with him from Jawwaz. The embroidery was gold and it bore the emblem of Lady Yahya’s house (the griffin and the rose) a symbol of his right to travel under her blessing. Such a boon gave him leeway, particularly with a man like Dhabr. _(‘Enough. I will take the women, the boy and those six Jafari men over there. The rest I have no use for.’)_ Abana peeked a subtle look at him from the corner of his grey eyes. Unlike Hakkan, he had not changed much these past two years, save for his attire. _(‘Kushwaris. And weak ones at that.’)_

Dhabr was swathed (rather garishly for a mere caravan trader) from shoulder to slipper in an ebon-black cloak and a lavish crimson doublet trimmed with gold. He was also a stout man and his girth served him no favours in this heat. Abana could say much about Dhabr _(‘Set them free? Chop them up for pig’s feed? The choice is yours, my friend!’)_ but one thing he _could not_ say was that he was unsuited to the labours of mercantilism.

From his camel’s saddle Dhabr oft bellowed strict orders for his men to keep up with him (and so they did) driving the caravan’s thirty camels along at a brisk but measured speed. These days Dhabr trafficked in nothing that could spoil (silk, jade, myrrh, incense, figs, wheat, etc) but he kept a tight pace amongst his ranks of pay-beaters and sell-backs. He suffered no stragglers and spared no flesh the rigours of his whip (should its misfortunate bearers chose to displease him).

Men like Dhabr were blunt instruments – cretinous and loathsome but frighteningly suited to certain tasks. Lady Yahya could not have chosen anyone better to smuggle he and Maliq into Tehraq.

Somewhere behind them Abana and Dhabr overheard a monstrous scream from one of the animal cages. The caravaner scrubbed the sweat from his brow with a single meaty fist as he ordered one of his henchmen to see what was happening without breaking formation. As it would later turn out (for Abana was too tired from sun fatigue to turn back and enquire) one of the capuchins had gotten loose and startled the falcons. The sell-back returned the monkey to his cage and secured its damaged lock with a rope.

“Men are tamer than animals,” said Dhabr. He pulled a bloated waterskin from his belt, popped the cork, drank, then handed it over to his guest.

“Indeed,” Abana took a few welcome gulps. It was his first drink of water since daybreak. “Are they gifts of some sort?”

Dhabr nodded, his shoulders rising and falling with his camel’s every step. “Specifically requested by one of my governor patrons for the coming festivities in Tehraq. When King Qattullah returns home the whole city shall turn to the streets to celebrate his annexation of Kushwar, and those beasts will be presented to him at his banquet.”

_‘Annexation…’_ thought Abana. Such a diplomatic word for such a boorish man (and such a polite way of describing so thorough a conquest). Kushwar was a land of vast expanse but devoid of mineral wealth. Its only bounty lay in its fertile soil and it was (historically) of little consequence to the Tehraqi Kings, but after a series of raids by the mountain tribes had disrupted the flow of wheat into the city a year prior, King Qattullah sought to consolidate his hold on the region. The scriveners would record for posterity’s sake that King Qattullah I (son of Gurkhan II and grandson of Gurkhan the Great, titles and so on) arrived with a host of 20,000 men at the ‘behest’ of the Ban of Kushwar to ‘liberate their Kushwari brothers from the subjugation of the vile mongrel tribesmen’ but even the lowliest tongue-wagger in the tavern knew that was a lie. It was a bloodless conquest of another name – _annexation_ – so told by the Ban’s prompt abdication after the defeat of those mountain tribesmen.

King Qattullah was not a man to take lightly.

_‘Bastards attract bastards…’_ thought Abana.

“The annexation is a great victory,” said Dhabr.

_‘Against a windy flatland of paupers and goatherds…?’_ thought Abana, finding himself even more disgusted with Dhabr than he already was. The caravaner’s thick Tehraqi accent was rough on the ears and betrayed his lower caste origins – and yet he spoke so confidently about matters of politics – matters far beyond his station. Abana smirked at him. Spending so much time around his highborn clientele had caused him to forget his place… but Abana knew better. The highborn had a habit of reminding you… one way or another.

“How true, Lord Dhabr,” said Abana. “You are most wise in these matters. Would that I knew more of politics.”

Dhabr cast a broad grin.

The two mounted guardsmen at the head of the caravan stopped their camels by the slope of a sandy ridge and exchanged cheerful grins amongst themselves. Abana broke ranks with Dhabr and coaxed his camel forward until he saw what the guards saw with his own grey eyes.

Tehraq.

The sight of that sprawling sandstone metropolis stopped Abana’s breath dead in his throat. As loathe as he was to admit it, the city remained an astounding sight; from its towers and observatories to its tenements and aqueducts, its markets and its plazas, the profuse winding laneways interlocking its many shrines, libraries, temples, academies, waystations, forums and barracks. Even from that distant cliff edge he spotted numerous trading vessels floating into its wharfs along the Kazara; a gigantic river cutting through Tehraq’s heart and bisecting it into two separate wards; North District for the highborn and South District for the low. Its ancient wonders stood proud as ever – the 25-cubit high walls of the Old City, the Hanging Gardens of Sur, the Necropolis, the Coliseum of Kings, the immense redoubt of Hyadara Fortress; and most impressive of all the Sun Court, King Qattullah’s residence and the seat of his power.

Tehraq was once one of the three great cities of the Abyyabid Empire and it was the _sole_ surviving city of its catastrophic collapse. Its last census (commissioned in the year 1170) estimated that nearly a million people called it home. It was the centre of civilization… and it was the evillest place in all the known world.

Abana’s blood boiled.

Not so long ago the dancer recalled himself fleeing from those towering sandstone walls… and yet here he was again. The dancer’s eyes rolled from those walls to an unassuming domed palace on the northern bank of the Kazara just a mile or so east of the legendary Azarashapur Market. It was a palace Abana knew all too well.

The Elephant Palace.

_‘I am coming for you,’_ he thought, seething. _‘I care not cost… I am COMING for you…’_

Hoofbeats turned him away from the city to the sands behind him. Unlike the other caravaners Maliq was on horseback and he rode up to Abana’s side from beyond the rear end of the caravan. The last oasis was more than two hours behind them, but his steed was a swift one and covered the ground in half the time.

The horse whickered as its rider frowned at the ancient city. “…That day we escaped Tehraq I prayed to your gods and mine that I would _never_ lay eyes upon this city again. And now…”

“Is it done?”

Maliq’s frown deepened. “…Yes.”

Abana breathed a sigh of relief he had not realized he’d been holding. Two hours behind their backs, weighed down by stones and rope, the corpse of Dhabr’s apprentice bled out from its slit throat into the azure waters of the oasis. They would be within Tehraq’s walls for days before anyone found the body, but there was disgust in Maliq’s eyes. It was unmistakable.

_‘…Apologies, my love, but we cannot suffer any spies, potential or otherwise,’_ Abana’s eyes returned to the city, _‘Not with a task of this scale…’_

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

His father could not say what killed the goats. He spent much of the morning inspecting their bodies but found no bites or wounds (which precluded jackals) and none were stolen (which precluded thieves). Their gritted teeth, enflamed gums and wilting fur suggested some sort of illness they had never seen before – and it burned through the herd like a flame through the night.

Tawab was a man prone to rages. Abana ibn Tawab and Paja had both suffered his knuckles in anger. Years ago, he split a headman’s lip for underbidding him at Hafiz market, shouting that the mere ‘insult’ warranted correction. None had challenged him then. As the third son of the previous Ban of Kushwar he’d had stature – stature enough for an exiled Paladin to accept his proposal of marriage to his beloved daughter; stature enough for a handsome dowry of 400 silverlings, 80 acres, 100 goats, and 30 cattle – for time, at least. Fouzan died just a few days before Abana’s birth and his entire household fled the instant his ashes left the pyre. The guards, the servants, the handmaids and the steward all made off with whatever wealth they could carry to fund their route back to luxurious Nyssinia and away from the cold hills of Kushwar.

 _‘It was a terrible time’_ , Paja had once said of this. _‘The ignobility of it all… to be robbed and abandoned by your servants… we were laid low, your father and I, we children of highborn men.’_

They survived the betrayal by selling off half their land to the Ban’s estate and hiring tenants to work what was left with the proceeds, but Tawab was a cruel master at the best of times. When he put the beating stick to his head boy’s son and broke his teeth, the tenants stole some goats and absconded that very evening – but not before setting the main residence on fire.

Abana still had the burn scars on his left shoulder.

As Tawab had no money for repairs or new tenants, he, Paja and Abana had no choice but to take up residence in the servant quarters and work the land themselves – to grow their own crops, herd their own goats, stitch their own linens – like any commoner would. In the year 1159 (although exiles and third sons) they were people of their station, living as their birth rights dictated – but by 1164 they were destitute paupers. The one thing keeping them from starvation was their herd… and now the entire herd was dead. Abana spent his morning trembling, not from cold, but from fear of his father’s rage. Though his mind was awash with questions – _“what will we do?”_ , _“how will we survive?”_ , _“how did this happen?”_ he dared not ask them. Instead he followed his father’s every instruction dutifully as he and Tawab dragged the first goat corpse out of the paddock and strung it up upon the branches of their butchering tree.

“Abana. It is time for you to become a man and take more responsibility,” as he said this, Tawab pulled a short-bladed cleaving knife from his belt. The son had seen the father slaughter his fattened goats many a time for many a year and was familiar with the process – stun the beast with a heavy stone to the head, then hang it and slit its throat and bleed it into a gourd. Cut the skin from the hindlegs down to the belly and forelegs, then remove the hide. Cross cut the belly to remove the guts, intestines, liver, and kidneys, then bisect the ribcage to remove the heart and the windpipe. Spare the best of the organs, take the carcass to cool and salt the hide for tanning. Abana saw it done many a time.

But he had never been asked to do it himself.

“Come,” Tawab put the knife in his hand. “Cut from the hoofs down like I showed you.”

Abana froze.

“What are you waiting for? Do it.”

Abana could not move.

“CUT THE GOAT, BOY!” Roared Tawab.

 _‘This was Jahan’_ , he thought. ‘ _You told me not to give them names but if only in my mind…’_ The slap that followed hit so suddenly it knocked the knife out of Abana’s hands and sent the boy screaming into the dirt. Through misty tears Abana watched Tawab tower over him, the sun at his back blackening him into some cruel dark idol he dared not recognize as a father.

“Curse the gods for cursing _me_ with such a WEAK son,” he spat. “Fetch your mother and take her place by the hearth. Go! Now!”

Abana scrambled to his feet before his tears began to spill and incense his father any further. He ran from the butchering tree in the yard through the curtained doors of the pantry and into the living chamber where Paja sat stitching up some of her old working linens upon her reed mat. She worked the needle gingerly so as not to strain her bruises.

“Abana?”

“Mama,” the boy scrubbed his eyes. “Baba w-wants you to help him b-butcher the goats. I wanted to help, I genuinely wanted to, but…”

Paja sighed. “…Try not to think unkindly of your father, Abana. He is not angry with us… merely with the situation. Without the herd we will not survive this coming winter.”

“W-what will we do?”

There was a grey gloom in Paja’s eyes, palpable and foreboding like the rime scent preceding a heavy downfall. She put aside her needle, stood upon her bare feet and turned towards her father’s mantled sword. Jahanshah sat as it always did – bold, _beautiful,_ and ornate – the one thing the traitors could not take, the last symbol and testament to their family’s former greatness.

A diamond in the dung heap.

“We shall do what we must, Abana,” said Paja solemnly. “We shall do what we must.”


	2. Of Sons and Swords

(Late Winter, 1179)

At high noon Dhabr’s caravan entered Tehraq by way of its western gate; a frescoed archway secured by 15-cubits high ironwood doors and a small contingent of the elite guardsmen known as the _Wahdi_. Purposefully distinctive by their peacock-plumed riveted helms and white-gold tabards sown with chainmail; they boasted over 8000 men and were tasked with maintaining order in the city.

Abana of Hafiz knew them well.

During King Gurkhan II’s reign the _Wahdi_ ranks drew from the fighting men of recently conquered provinces to weaken potential resistance and strengthen Tehraqi ties – but when the day finally came for his son Qattullah’s rule, that policy was supplanted with a more… ‘practical’ system of patronage. _Wahdi_ captains and marshals were taken from cadet branches of the royal bloodline and gifted with lavish households within city limits, fostering superior loyalty (and dependency) to the crown and its holdings. The _Wahdi_ were as corrupt as any other Tehraqis, highborn or low, but their power stemmed from the maintenance of that corruption. 

The group of _Wahdi_ defending the gate numbered only eight. As they stopped each passing caravan half of their number conducted searches of every wagon, cart, chest and saddlebag as the master caravaners dropped purses of gold into the tollmaster’s coffer box.

The Dancer of Hafiz tightened the silk shawl around his hair and face as one of the _Wahdi_ , a woollen-jawed spearman, passed his camel by with a lusty sneer. Though Abana recognized none of their faces there was no telling who amongst them might recognize _him_.

“Gentlemen!” Dhabr pulled as bright a smile as was physically possible. “Blessings be upon you for receiving us on this most momentous of days, but there will be no need of a search. Please see this writ of passage as granted to me by her ladyship the Governess of Jawwaz.”

It was a thin wrap of parchment bound by twine and sealed with wax. He passed it to one of the _Wahdis_ , who in turn handed it over to the tollmaster to verify its authenticity, which he _did_ , with a frowning sneer.

“As you can see no toll is due nor is any search permissible. But as always Lady Yahya is mindful of the great work the _Wahdi_ do in protecting the king’s peace and so she permits me to present you with a gift!” Dhabr clapped his hands twice. Two of his men brought forth a heavy goods chest from a donkey cart and rested it at the tollmaster’s sandaled feet – it contained twelve full bottles of finely aged red wine. The tollmaster popped a cork and took a swig – then waved to his men to let them through.

Smiling, Dhabr rode forth with Abana and Maliq and the rest of his caravan closely in tow. They emerged from the western gate onto the lowborn side of the Kazara River, and it remained as foul a midden as Abana remembered it.

Paupers, idlers and wastrels sat chafing in the dry heat of its narrow streets. From its sandstone tenements and tented dwellings floated linen lines and decaying bird traps, long abandoned by the street urchins who hung them. Only a handful of _Wahdi_ bothered to patrol the area but they stopped for neither the sick nor the dying, often only escorting temple novitiates distributing alms to the poor – bread, fruit, fresh clothes, etc.

As Dhabr’s caravan passed through the area Abana noticed a glint of malice in the local populace. Some had hoes and sickles nearby, and they were large enough in number to swarm a caravan of that size if they were at all coordinated – but Dhabr’s guardsmen kept watchful eyes on them – and a hand none-to-far from their weapons (as did Maliq). But Abana was more distracted by the cross-like symbols he saw painted on certain doors. He asked Dhabr about it.

“There was once a plague outbreak here,” he said. “It’s been years since the ward was quartered off and few dared come back save for those too poor to live anywhere else. Not a particularly savoury place but well suited to discreet meetings away from prying eyes.”

 _‘And therefore, well chosen,’_ thought Abana. _‘Thank you, Lady Yahya…’_

Abana and Maliq separated from Dhabr’s caravan at the centre of the old plague ward where no _Wahdi_ was in sight and the streets were all but empty, save for the beetles and mice. They dismounted the camels and handed the reins of one of the guardsmen who kept the caravan moving eastwards toward their last stop, the great souq of K’luthu.

“Thank you for helping us, Lord Dhabr,” said Maliq, in his gruff baritone. “We might not have made it this far if not for your help.”

The caravaner nodded. “I merely do as our Lady Yahya commands. She helped me also… a highborn who took pity on a pox-scarred lowborn and made of him what he is today. I do not pretend to understand what is happening here but if it is her wish… then I am happy to help see it done. Gods keep you both.”

He took his leave. Dhabr gestured for his men to move out and they followed his commands, coaxing the camels and mules along. Abana and Maliq stood aside in the dusty, empty streets watching them go – until the swordsman leaned into the dancer’s ear.

“When did you dose him?”

Abana looked on, still faced. “A day ago, my love. Bitterblack is slow to kill. Tonight, he will develop a fever. Tomorrow he will be paralyzed. The day after that? Organ failure and death.”

“Lady Yahya will be displeased – Dhabr was her man and bitterblack is her signature poison, she will know it was us.”

“Lady Yahya will not _care_ once I show her this,” Abana had a thin black book inside his leather pack. He showed it to Maliq, who opened it and stared blankly at its numbers. Though his reading lessons in Tehraqi had come a long way, Abana had yet to teach him mathematics.

“What _is_ this?” Asked Maliq.

“Dhabr’s ledger – an account of his business. He has skimmed off 5% of the governess’ profits for the last two years. Once I show her that, I promise you, she will thank us for ridding her of him.”

“Had I known you had acquired such a talent for deception and ruthlessness…”

Abana glowered. “…This ruthless city and its deceptive people taught me well.” 

They waited until the caravan trundled off beneath the baking sun before meeting with their Tehraqi contact at the allotted place – the crumbling scaffold of a tavern house abandoned before even the plague outbreak.

Maliq, keeping a close hand to his sword, led the way in through a broken plank wood door. It was dour inside, save for some lit sconces and a few blades of light piercing through its cracked roof. Old cobwebs swung from rafters stained with vulture droppings. Dusty broken tables and stools laid across the tavern floor shattered into fragments. There were no echoes of drunken revelry, only silence. Silence… and a few shuffling footsteps.

Maliq dove in front of Abana as a squat Tehraqi man swathed in fine velvet robes and a tasselled half-cloak emerged from the shadows. Two tall men lingered in that darkness, obscuring their faces (but not their daggers).

“Magistrate Tayyab?” said Abana.

He nodded. “And you are Lady Yahya’s protegee, no? It is a great pleasure to meet you. And your friend?”

Maliq frowned. “I am his protector.”

“I supposed. May I also apologize for the ignobility of our surrounds… but as you might imagine conspiracies of this nature require certain… measures of secrecy.”

_‘Measures of deniability more like,’_ thought Abana. As a man he knew nothing of Tayyab, but as a dancer he knew much of Tayyab’s _ilk_. No Tehraqi ever obtained a position of power in this city without greed, shrewdness, cynicism, and an unquenchable thirst for elevation. And sure enough…

“Forgive my abruptness but before we begin there was the matter of payment?”

_‘Right on schedule’_ , thought Abana. Payment in this instance was not in silverlings but a thoroughbred bay mare called Sunfire. She was the finest of Lady Yahya’s stock long coveted by Tayyab – and the sole price of his compliance. Though the swordsman found the magistrate as loathsome as the dancer did, he withdrew Sunfire’s title deed from his satchel and cautiously handed it to one of Tayyab’s guards.

The Magistrate grinned. “Wonderful! Now that that is out of the way, let us talk.”

“Apologies but there is little to talk of,” said Abana. “You know my design, yes?”

Tayyab’s smile darkened. Blood was wine to a Tehraqi nobleman. “Indeed. You are here to assassinate the grand vizier of Tehraq, the great Rahab of Mahmun. And on behalf of the governors of King Qattullah I am here to welcome you.”

 _‘Then Lady Yahya was right’_ , thought Abana. _‘The other governors want Rahab gone as well’_. “So… we have their backing?”

“Not in the light, of course.”

Abana frowned. Here came the caveat. “…Then I take it we can expect no further help from here on out?”

“They ‘help’ you by choosing not to kill you in your sleep,” said the Magistrate. “Like or not Rahab of Mahmun is the king’s chief advisor and any footprint traceable to your endeavours would put them all in grave danger. Your mistress is also a Tehraqi by birth… she knows our customs.”

These men were bastards of the highest order – despotic vultures gnawing at the carcasses their king left in his wake – but they were _nothing_ if not wise. Meeting here in an old plague ward was not merely Lady Yahya’s aid in keeping he and Maliq safe… it was to allow the conspirators plausible deniability if their plan should fail.

Abana wondered if the Magistrate knew that those very same governors he stood for would slit his throat in a second to spare themselves if need be.

“The governors mourn her tenure as grand vizier,” said Tayyab. “Back then our great king was amenable to counsel and reason… but much has changed since Rahab usurped your mistress. The governors seek a restoration to that orderliness and to that end I was deployed.”

“And how can _you_ help us?” asked Maliq.

Tayyab smiled at him. “As grand vizier Rahab is the second most powerful man in the city and his residence is heavily fortified. However! I bring to you a stratagem…”

The Magistrate snapped his fingers. One of his men put a fist to his chest and bowed (the Tehraqi salute) and left to retrieve something collared by the neck and tethered to a spool of rope. A woman. A shivering and blindfolded woman. Abana blinked, half aghast, as the Magistrate’s guardsman dropped the girl at his master’s slippered feet. Tayyab went on to explain that she was a ‘procurement’ from the recent annexation of Kushwar, said by the former Ban to be one of its six greatest dancers.

“When the king returns home from the Kushwar campaign Rahab will host a banquet in his honour and the six Kushwari dancers will perform for them. You will take this girl’s place as one of the chosen six. That will be your way in.”

Though Abana mistrusted the way it was so cleanly laid out for him (albeit with Lady Yahya’s consent) it was a good plan. Still he could not help but feel pity for the captured Kushwari girl. They stuffed her ears with cotton as well as blindfolding her – clearly, they had plans for her after this.

“And this girl? What happens to her now?”

“A dancer who does not dance has no value,” said the Magistrate. “She will dance for _me_ – the other half of my reward.”

_‘Bastard’_ thought Abana. He was disgusted but not surprised. The Tehraqi people (in large part) worshipped the sun god Mnenomon – master of wisdom and king of his pantheon. According to the high priests of Mnenomon, all Tehraqi women were his ‘wives’ until they came of age and ‘re-married’ a suitable man of her father’s choosing, or as it was said in the Book of Mnenomon – _no man may seed Mnenomon’s soil ‘til the farmer opens the gate_. To symbolize this the Tehraqi woman donned the veil from maturation and was forbidden from laying with any man until her wedding day. But Tehraqi men were a lusty breed – if they could not plough Mnenomon’s soil, they could certainly plough that of _other_ gods. Since foreign women like the Kushwari girl and beautiful boys like Abana fell outside of Mnenomon’s remit, they were like treasured delicacies in Tehraq.

_‘Do not worry, little one. I will find a way to help you,’_ thought Abana. “So be it. What happens now?”

Tayyab grabbed the rope tied to the girl’s collar and yanked her up to her feet for one of his guards to take her away. “The girl had residency assigned to her in Butcher’s Square. Go there and await a rider in the night – he will take you to the residence of Governor Ganu, who is tasked with preparing the six dancers for the banquet. A word of caution, however. Lord Ganu is one of the few governors who knows nothing of this grand plot of ours. If he divines your true purpose or suspects even the slightest hint of subterfuge, he will execute you – and we will deny any knowledge of your existence.”

_‘I’d expect nothing less,’_ thought the Dancer of Hafiz. “I understand and I will not fail. Please give my regards to the governors for their generous help.”

“Glory to Mnenomon,” Tayyab smirked. “And may he grant you his luck. There are dark forces at Rahab’s back… killing him will be no small task.”

Abana frowned. _‘No one knows that better than I.’_

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

Abana ibn Tawab spent most of that morning washing the blood out of his namesake’s clothes after he and Paja finished butchering all fifty of the dead goats. What meat they couldn’t salt, they carried onto their last remaining donkey cart with the intention of selling them at the market of Hafiz – the wool and horns they kept for themselves.

The sun was high when a thunder eyed Tawab mounted the seat of his cart and coaxed his donkey ahead onto the dirt road towards Hafiz village. Hours later, when the sun was low and Abana soaked the last few robes in a soiled bucket, Tawab returned. He led the donkey by its reins with one hand, and two lashed goats with the other. The donkey cart juddered along the way with welcomed new cargo; two full sacks (one of wheat and the other of grain), a bottle of wine, a reed basket full of fruit, and six full jars of what Abana would later learn was salt (to preserve what little of the goat meat they could keep). The boy was elated! But as his father trundled in through the flimsy wooden gates of their property, Abana saw the wrathful look in the older man’s eyes and recognized the truth – he had been _undersold_ at market.

“Boy,” growled Tawab. “Take these two goats to the pen and water them. I will unload this cart. Quickly now! Be about it.”

“Yes, baba.”

Abana did as he was told and left the tunic to soak in the bloody bucket. The two does were scrawny for their age and deeply malnourished, it would take weeks to get them healthy enough to produce a suitable supply of milk. Nevertheless, Abana calmly led them by their ropes to the pen where he fetched some fresh water from the well for them to drink.

The sun had set (and the house was full of the scent of mutton) as Tawab, Paja and Abana sat to bowls of stew that evening. The boy and his mother stayed quiet as the father cursed the ‘swindling’ market traders he did business with that day. “Enough meat to feed half of Hafiz and barely anything to show for it. Bastards! Sons of whores! In my father’s days we kept those blasted lowborn merchants on a tight leash! Now they prance over their betters as though the world had turned on its head. Curses upon them and the pig-fuckers who sired them!”

Paja frowned. She had always misliked the foulness of Tawab’s tongue. “Regrets, husband. They were unkind. Let us pray to the gods that better days are ahead of us.”

Tawab sighed. “Paja, get me some water.”

His wife nodded, took his empty cup, then left the room to fetch some. When she was out of earshot Tawab cast an eye at his late father-in-law’s sword, Jahanshah. Its golden scabbard and bejewelled pommel caught a bright glow from the pit-hearth.

“It is comical,” muttered Tawab absently. His eyes never left the sword. “Though Fouzan was disgraced, your mother came from good breeding, and marrying her was the proudest day of my life. I once had… dreams of leaving this land to a steward and taking her to Tehraq where I could become a paladin and restore her family’s honour… but instead we suffer in squalor. How can _that_ be fair? What gods would permit this ignobility?”

_‘He truly_ is _going to sell the sword,’_ thought Abana. It was the last vestige of their nobility; their pride incarnated. And somewhere inside that cold stone heart of his, it grieved Tawab to sell it.

“ _Baba_ ,” Abana swallowed the lump in his throat as he spoke. “Forgive me… it is not my place, but… are some things not _worth_ the sacrifice?”

Tawab glared at him levelly. “…Are they?”

“You always taught me that a man who cannot provide for his family is not a man, and that we must do all we can to survive. Is that not so? _Was_ that not so?”

Most of the time his father’s face was either a grim mask or a furious one. For the first time in perhaps his entire life… he saw a sliver, just a faint scintilla of emotion in Tawab’s dark brown eyes. He moved his lips to speak but Paja re-emerged from the pantry with a fresh cup of water for her husband to drink. Whatever he wanted to say in that moment, it was gone the next.

“Slake your thirst, my love.” She said.

Tawab offered thanks with a grunt. “I will return to market tomorrow morning… and Abana will come with me.”

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

If the dwelling in Butcher’s Square was anything to go by then the governors prepared small but comfortable abodes for the Kushwari dancers. Not a speck of dust matted the stone floor (which was made softer on the feet by finely embroidered rugs) and sheets of lilac-coloured linen hung from the walls as decoration. Next to a mount of throw pillows sat a wine gourd and a platter full of grapes (green and red), a sliced wheel of cheese, and buttered hunks of fried bread. This was not the reception captives typically received in Tehraq. No doubt the governors had other plans for those women after the king’s banquet.

Abana of Hafiz tried not to think about it as he lay nestled in Maliq’s strong arms. Though a burning hatred dwelt within Abana’s heart, it was never tamer than when he found himself in Maliq’s embrace; nothing in this world felt more peaceful or safe. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world was letting him go.

But it was almost time.

“I hate to leave you,” whispered Maliq.

“You are not leaving me. You will _never_ leave me. But you cannot accompany me to Ganu’s residence, my love. Besides, that Kushwari girl… I cannot leave her in the Magistrate’s clutches. I need you to free her.”

Maliq frowned. “That was not part of our plan, Abana. Cheating one of our few allies could backfire.”

The dancer let his delicate fingertips wander the contours of the swordsman’s muscled torso until they stopped just shy of Maliq’s breastbone. Abana dipped his lips towards the stiff, copper-coloured flesh of his left nipple. Maliq stifled a moan through pursed lips.

“Have faith in me,” said Abana. “Once our work is done, we will go elsewhere. North, south, east, west – it matters not… so long as I am with you… and the work is done. I need naught else.”

There was indecision in Maliq’s eyes (though he did not voice it). It had been there ever since they first set out from Lady Yahya’s manse in Jawwaz, _the Sanguine Vigil_ – and it had not abated. Nevertheless, the tall warrior lumbered up from mount of throw pillows and gathered all his discarded clothes and chainmail together. Once dressed he donned one of their lady’s many gifts; a sable hooded cloak broad enough to obscure his whole frame and hide his face. He left his two swords Jahanshah and Lion’s Claw where they were (with his sword belt) as they were too conspicuous for shadow-walking the tenements of Tehraq – instead he made do with a carefully concealed kidney spike hidden beneath the folds of his tunic. There were two in their possession and Abana had the other; it was poison-tipped and destined for Rahab of Mahmun’s heart.

“I do this only for you,” said Maliq. “But stray no further from our plan. Once you are moved from Ganu’s residence to the Elephant Palace I will come for you. Take no more risks and _await_ me.”

Abana ran over to him and kissed him before he dared leave. The sooner this was over the sooner he could finally leave these miserable lands and start afresh with the man he loved. Abana and Maliq brought their foreheads together for one last embrace before they parted. It would not be for long – but the danger was so great.

“Be careful, my sweet. You are the only thing keeping me on this hell of a world.”

Maliq smiled softly. “I have not come this far just to fall now. It is as you said… I will _never_ leave you.”

After that the swordsman slipped away as quietly and discreetly as he could. The plywood door clacked shut behind him. Abana gripped his shoulders and shivered. He _hated_ being without Maliq. It felt like being tossed into the cold and the dark. But he did not dwell on it long.

There was work to be done.

The Dancer of Hafiz walked over to the pool of throw pillows and opened his pack. Everything was there. His jars of ochre and henna, his lilac veil and sequin mesh, his ankle bells, castanets and incense. It was everything he needed for his rituals. Abana buckled the satchel and slipped his slight frame inside his own sable cloak. Less than an hour later there was a knock at the door. The rider had come.

Abana exhaled. _‘Time to go.’_

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

It was a brutally cold morning that day. Abana ibn Tawab recalled that much with alacrity. The mountain winds whistled in through the narrow slit carved into the sandstone as a window and goose-pimpled the boy’s skin as he struggled to keep warm beneath his moth-eaten blanket. His mind faded in and out of an uncomfortable sleep marred by visions of clutched fists and sloughing offal. He hadn’t slept this badly since he was a child when servants told him horrific fables of ghouls who fed upon yearning and carried off naughty children in night.

A thick hand grabbed his shoulder. Abana jumped (almost screaming) before he saw Tawab towering over him with a flaming torch in the darkness. The boy exhaled.

“Baba,” he said. “It’s just you.”

Tawab eyed him flatly. “Put on your clothes. We are going to Hafiz market.”

The boy did as he was told without question. In his mind he wondered why it was necessary to leave this early (would the market even be open?) but upon closer thought he supposed that Tawab found a specific buyer for the sword, one that was like to pay him more fairly for it than the common market traders. His father would not stand to be swindled on Jahanshah like he was on the goat’s meat. Once dressed Abana followed him outside into the yard where the donkey had already been hitched to the cart, and there was a long plywood box covered with cloth loaded in the back.

 _‘We are doing the right thing,’_ reasoned Abana as he climbed into the cart. _‘We are doing this to preserve our family. Judge us not, grandbaba, your spirit lives on in our hearts. I will become someone worthy of you, I will make you and Mama and Baba proud of me. I will buy back the sword one day, I swear it.’_

Tawab passed him the torch and then lumbered onto the seat, taking the reins and whipping the donkey into motion. As the cart rolled away from their homestead and his beloved (and slumbering) mother, Abana held the torch aloft and wondered what he _would_ _be_ if they survived to see another winter. Certainly, he did not want to herd goats for the rest of his life. Could he one day go to Tehraq and be a paladin like his grandfather Fouzan? The thought did appeal to him – but he’d never held a sword in anger his whole life. He knew nothing of swordsmanship or martial prowess. What sort of paladin would he make?

As the donkey card turned onto the highway and trundled west of the valley, Abana wondered why he’d never thought much for his future. As a child Paja oft sung lullabies of their family’s former glory and encouraged him to embrace that legacy. _“Become a great man, my son, and restore our honour_.” She spoke less of such aspirations in recent years.

 _‘What shall I be?’_ thought Abana.

A scholar or a merchant, perhaps? As a boy his mother was the closest thing he had to tutor so he had no proper education, but he could read and write and count (which was better than most merchants according to his father) and although Kushwari was his birth tongue his mother taught him to speak Tehraqi fluently; in that way alone he was better placed than most to succeed in this life.

Abana spent most of his ride to Hafiz thinking in this manner. He did not notice it when his father guided the donkey cart off the dirt track highway onto a rougher side road than wound off into the hillocks overlooking the valley basin. Only when the cart’s wheels bucked against the characteristically pebbled ground did it dawn on him that they were going the wrong way. Abana held up the torch a bit higher but it was still too dark to see very much out there beyond the panorama of the mountains.

And then the cart stopped.

“Baba?”

Tawab, cold and silent, climbed off the wagon seat and landed on the crunchy dirt path as a shadowed figure approached them from the left. Abana gasped and swung the torch in that direction to get some light. It was cold and he was scared. He could barely think. As the shadowed man drew closer some cloth was pulled and a wooden box opened. Abana looked down at the noise. The box was empty. Jahanshah was not in there. Then he looked up and sat agape as his father loomed over him with stone cold eyes and an outstretched knobkerrie.

“B-Baba…?”

Tawab frowned at him. “I will not apologize, but… try to understand I am not doing this because I want to.”

The blow was swift and sudden. Abana did not feel it when he hit the planks or dropped the torch; nor did he feel himself being dragged off the cart. All went to black. 

*

Hours later he slowly awoke to a wet stone floor beneath his naked feet and the taste of blood on his lips. When he tried to move his hand to wipe it away his wrists did not budge. Scared, Abana opened his eyes and saw why. He was in chains. And when he looked around the room, he saw three dozen more just like him; enchained and scared and beaten and cold and sweaty, huddled up like husks of themselves and wailing into the dungeon’s dank dripping blackness.

 _‘Slaves…!’_ Abana shivered. _‘Oh no! Oh no!’_


	3. Slave's Path

(Early Summer, 1176)

_‘How could he…?’_ thought Abana ibn Tawab. _‘How could he…? How could he do this?’_

He shivered from cold and fear as his mind raced through events trying to explain away what happened but no matter how many times, his recollections always came back to the truth – his own father sold him. He knew Tawab did not care for him, that he always desired a stronger son to bear his name… but to think that his father hated him this much? ‘ _Why?’_ Because he was not strong? Could he not _become_ strong one day? _‘Why did you do this?’_ Because he was softly voiced and preferred cooking and cleaning to the idles of goat-herding? Had he not always found time for both? _‘Why did you do this to me, father? Why? Why? Why?’_

What was it he said?

_‘I will not apologize, but… try to understand I am not doing this because I want to.’_

How could Abana ever understand **that**?

The boy sobbed and felt for all the world like being sucked into whatever abysmal chasm begat the ghouls. Tears gushed from his eyes until they burnt. He heaved and sobbed and cried until the stink of urine enflamed his nostrils. He looked down and saw a puddle of his own making spread out from beneath his tunic and sandals.

“Filthy boy!” It was another slave that said it from across the floor – a Kushwari man some good years older than him. “Control yourself! Stop crying!”

Abana, eyes enflamed, bit his lip. Why had the gods seen fit to lay him so low? What had he done in this life that was so ignoble that he deserved a fate such as this? Was he not highborn? Was he not the grandson of a paladin? Was he not-

The boy’s mind raced until he heard something tear to his left. It was too dark in that dwelling to see much but, in the shadows, he saw a dark-skinned woman (a denizen of the distant southern lands of Jafara) shred a piece of her own skirt and turn to him with a small but resolute smile. Her chains rattled as she placed the torn cloth into his hands and pointed at the puddle beneath him.

“Do… not do,” said the woman in a broken Tehraqi tongue. “Slavers beat you. Do more? Beat _us_. Do not do. Be strong. _Strong_.”

Strength was the one thing Abana always lacked. He was not strong like Tawab or his grandbaba Fouzan. He had no stomach for butchery or swordsmanship or violence. What even was strength in a dung hole such as this? What was strength if it could be claimed by someone as frail as him?

But the Jafari woman’s broad smile was relentless as she continued to point at the puddle. _Go on_ , as if to say. _Be strong_. From the look of her she had been in captivity for months – but somewhere inside there was still heart enough for a smile and a helping hand. Was _that_ strength? If it was… maybe it started small. Maybe the best thing Abana could do… was to take the cloth, dry his tears, wipe up his mess, stuff the soaked rag into a gap between the flagstones and take a deep breath.

The woman nodded. “Good.”

They were kept in the darkness like that for many hours. He heard many voices in the background, male and female, all crying or whispering or cursing, but it was too dark to put faces to them. The air was rancid and rife with the scents of blood and sweat and excrement. The cold was bad, but the lack of water was far worse, so much so that there was a judder of relief amongst the slaves as they overheard the door’s iron bolt slide out of its latch and swing open.

Abana winced at the sudden burst of light but willed himself to look as a Tehraqi man walked into the dungeon with a flaming torch in hand. He bore a tall frame packed with well-honed muscle beneath a tunic and a fur-trimmed half-cloak pinned by a ram’s head broach – the heraldic symbol of the al-Shapur merchant tribe. His head was bald shaven and tattooed with ancient sigils Abana could not decipher and a bloodstained whip dangled from a node upon his belt. Cruelty radiated from him like an aura. Behind this man followed five or six of his henchmen, each one carrying water gourds and sacks full of chopped bread. The slaves scrambled in their chains to draw close as they were roughly fed and watered by their captors.

“I am Hakkan,” said the torchbearer. “And you? It does not matter who you think you are… what matters is knowing _what_ you are. You are property. You are cattle. You are pigs. You are meat. You are both the bread your masters will eat and the hand that will serve it. You will belong to whomever I decide to sell you to and until such time… you belong to me.”

It was Abana’s turn to be fed. One of Hakkan’s men took him by the jaw (as if to yank open his mouth and force the water down his throat like he did to the other slaves) but stopped when he got a closer look at the boy. His broad gold teeth pulled an appreciative smile – he liked what he saw. What Abana saw in _him_ was an emotion that he did not yet understand but was destined to evoke in many other men in years to come – lust. The gold-toothed man let Abana drink gently, then fed him a hank of bread before moving on to the Jafari woman.

“You will NOT disobey,” said Hakkan. “You will NOT run away. If you dare to – I will catch you and I will punish you. Compliance will always be met with a fair hand. Defiance will not. Learn these lessons well…”

Once the bread sacks and water gourds were all empty, two of Hakkan’s men uncuffed five male captives and ordered them to stand in a line as a third man snapped iron collars around their necks. Each of the slave collars were yoked to the next one along by an iron chain 2 cubits long. The slavers did this for every five men until it was Abana’s turn. One of them yanked him up by his wrist and shoved him in line.

“No,” said the gold-toothed man. “Look at him. Such a pretty little chicken. Keep him with the women, he’ll fetch a higher price without calloused feet. It is going to be a long march to Qazyr.” 

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

The wagon made four more stops around the sandstone tenements of Butcher’s Square before all six Kushwari dancers had been collected. Abana of Hafiz sat at the rear of the cabin upon one of the cushioned seats left for them by Governor Ganu’s men and surveyed the all too familiar atmosphere amongst them – sombre. All five women were veiled but visibly beautiful in as much as Abana could see. Somewhere in each of their pasts a decerning Tehraqi eye had chosen well – to all their misfortunes. No one knew each other, no one looked anyone else in the eye and the silence was visceral. No sobbing or mournful wails, just cold resignation. As dancers none of them were unfamiliar with the unabashed cattle trade of human flesh… perhaps some had even been primed to make a pilgrimage of their own to Tehraq one day and perform in the harlequin district.

Or so he thought.

As the wagon rolled on Abana widened a tear in the tarp hood to peer outside and spy their location. Out in the distance he spotted the rushing black waters of the Kazara River, speckled with amber flecks of torchlight reflected from the sprawling tenements upon both its muddy banks. The wagon was almost halfway across the bridge when one of the dancers broke.

It was a sob. A powerful one, as though wrenched from the pit of her belly, one that belted out into a scream that jittered the other dancers. The girl smothered her face in her knees as she cried out mournfully, whimpering for her mother and father, begging to be returned home to them.

“Be quiet!” Seethed another dancer. “They will hear you!”

The girl did not listen.

She kept crying and crying until a sudden stench wafted through the air and a yellowy puddle spread out from the now soaked cushion beneath her. Frowning and tutting, the other dancers pulled away from her as Abana felt a twinge of sympathy.

_‘Strong’_ , he recalled. ‘ _Be strong’_.

And strength always started small.

Abana took out a large muslin cloth folded up in his sack (originally intended for him to lay out his cosmetics) and ambled over to the dancer’s side.

“Little one,” he said. “What is your name?”

The dancer’s eyes were blood red through the haze of her tears. Abana pitied her. There was no way she was any older than thirteen.

“H-Hima…,” she said. “My name is Hima…”

“I know that you are scared, Hima. All of us are. But right now, our lives are not our own. We are at the mercy of the men outside. If you do things like this, they will beat you. Keep on doing it, and they will beat _us_. Or? We can be _strong_. We can be strong and bide our time... and one day we will be free. Alright?”

The girl merely looked at him, unable to articulate what she was feeling. It did not matter to him. The other dancers then looked on in disbelief as Abana carefully mopped up the urine around the girl’s ankles and replace her befouled cushion with his own. That was when the wagon stopped. Trepidation reverberated amongst the dancers at the sudden sounds of dismount and whickering and shuffling sandals in the pebbly streets. The curtain doors at the rear flapped open and a hulking, spear armed _Wahdi_ (grinning with lust) ordered them out. One by one Abana and the other dancers climbed out of the wagon and formed a line before the towering sandstone walls of _Umayyah-khamat_ , the imperious residence of Governor Ganu.

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

It began in the mountains. There was no telling how far the dungeon he awoke in was from Hafiz, but it sat in the heart of an old silver mine nestled within the blustery cliffs of the Pushan Mountains, which overlooked the Great Kushwari Valley from the southwest. Hakkan marched the slaves out of the silver mine in chained lines of five or six (with two of his guards assigned to each line). An ancient lift (powered by little more than a wheel, a pulley and some tremendous human effort) ferried them up to the cave’s mouth at the surface where the slaver’s caravan awaited them.

In sum there were over fifty captives – forty men and fifteen women. Most were ethnically Kushwari, a few were Tehraqi by birth and a handful were of Jafari origins. Those men enchained were walked down the mountain path in single file whilst the women were herded into two of the caravan’s five wagons (the other three were for supplies). The caravan and its goods were protected by twenty armed cutthroats bearing whips and sharpened scythe swords. Hakkan’s guards dressed lightly for the excursion in half-plate armour, cowhide loincloths and leather strapped sandals. They staved off the mountain cold with heavy cloaks collared by goat’s fur. Eight of them were on horseback, including the caravan leader Hakkan and his deputy, the gold-toothed man.

Once the slaves had all been gathered Hakkan sent his procession into motion with a crack of his whip.

Their destination (as the captives would eventually learn) was the slave market of Qazyr, a small but bustling merchant’s outpost on the threshold of the wider Tehraqi domain – and it would not to be a short trip. The mountain path alone cut across eight parasangs of sloping, rocky territory besieged with heavy winds channelled through its narrow stone corridors. That morning the winds were particularly harsh as a storm approached the caravan from behind. Within three parasangs of the march that storm had darkened the skies as its black thunderheads caught up to them and hammered the footpaths with torrential rainfall. The guardsmen beat their whips for the slaves to keep pace, but as the constant rain belted the mountains, dislodged silt coursed down its slopes and turned the pathway into sludge. With the horses too frightened by the thunder to proceed, Hakkan ordered the caravan to take shelter in a cliffside cavern.

As it was large enough to bring the horses inside, the slaves were ordered to make camp for the night. They set up the tents and rolled out the pallets, made cook fires to boil water for stew (skinning captured hares and chopping up potatoes and onions). Most of the orders were doled out by a woollen-jawed slaver by the name of One-Eyed Wadja, seasoned caravaner fluent in both the Kushwari and Tehraqi tongues. He wore a necklace of bleached fingerbones broken from the hand of a runaway slave. 

The slavers ate first, then the slaves.

As usual they did not feed themselves. As they sat in their chains under close guard a few of the slavers came by with wooden ladles, one for stew and the other for water, to feed them. As usual one of them was the gold-toothed man… and as usual the gold-toothed man came to Abana ibn Tawab with a secretive grin.

The boy was repulsed by him. His golden smile did little to hide the cruelty behind it. His arms and legs were riddled with bulbous scar tissue and his odorous stink was overpowering. He was kind enough to give Abana an extra spoonful of stew (which he did appreciate) but the younger man still disliked him.

“Do you speak Tehraqi?” He asked.

Abana nodded yes.

“My name is Mehmoud,” he said. “What is yours?”

The Kushwari boy shuddered to utter it. Calling himself ‘ibn Tawab’ felt like a sorrowful joke. In the High East only the high _borns_ bore patronyms and yet here he was laid even _lower_ than a goatherd. Who or what was he now?

“Flea,” he said dourly. “I’m just a flea, lord.”

Mehmoud snickered. “I am not a lord. And you are too handsome for a flea. Choose a better name.”

Out of the corner of his eye he spotted a slave cleaning the iron cooking pot. Next into his bare feet sat a pile of greasy hare bones he had picked from it. The taste of it still lingered in his mouth.

“Rabbit,” _One who is caught and killed and to be served for the slaughter_. “My name is Rabbit.”

“A better name indeed. Well, ‘Rabbit’. Hakkan and I need a cupbearer for our tent. You will do this, no?”

Rabbit nodded. “…Yes. Sir.”

*

His sleep that night was restless and unsatisfying. Nightmares awoke him twice – visions of homes set ablaze and ghouls looming over him in the moonlight. Women’s screams. Chains and their foul iron stink. Crying and tears. So much crying, so many tears…

He and the other slaves were roused at first light to break camp. Once the wagons were fully loaded the caravan proceeded down the mountain path. Although its sludge-ridden road remained treacherous, the clouds had broken, and the rain had stopped. Much to Hakkan’s pleasure this meant resuming the pace he hoped to set a day earlier. He drove the male slaves on at twice the speed to make up the time lost in the storm and by noon they emerged at the foothills on the southwestern side of the Pushan Mountains. From there, so many hundreds of cubits in the air, Rabbit bore witness to the most breath-taking sight he had ever seen in his young life – the panorama of the true High East unfurling into the horizon beneath a bright crimson sun. Beyond the rocky outcroppings a sea of desert sand lay before him in all its splendour… and within it he spotted the sparse course the caravan was destined to take – a serpentine highway running from village to village, oasis to oasis, outpost to outpost. It was a beautiful sight. But neither he nor any of the other slaves were permitted much time to enjoy it. 

The slopes there were dangerously steep and much harder to traverse in the wake of the storm. By One-Eyed Wadja’s suggestion Hakkan slowed the caravan’s pace until it safely made its way to the sandy flatlands beneath the mountains.

They were no longer in Kushwar.

Rabbit (sitting listlessly amongst the female slaves in the frontmost wagon) gazed back at the mountain peaks as the caravan carried him away. Two things occurred to him then. _One_? He spent countless nights staring at those very same peaks from the north-eastern side and he had daydreamed many-a-time about the mysterious lands of Tehraq that lurked beyond. _For the first time in his life he had crossed those mountains_. Two? _There was no going back_. Though its Ban was deferential to the Tehraqi kings, Kushwar was its own domain with its own language, customs, and histories. He was now a foreign boy on foreign soil under the worst possible circumstances.

Kushwar was home – but no longer _his_ home.

Crossing the mountains had taken most of the day and with nightfall only a short few hours away, the slave caravan reached its first settlement since it departed – an unwalled mountain village called Tangrys, home to the collective estates of a few hundred local farmers and herders. The headman’s household flew two flags, the winged lion of the Tehraqi Kings and the bannered spear of the Ban of Kushwar – a gesture to honour both regions – though there was no question it paid _financial_ tribute to Tehraq alone.

The caravan came into Tangrys at dusk. Those few townsfolk still on the streets looked upon the passing slaves with disgust and pity. In his shame Rabbit could not look them in the eye. In his boyhood he too once gaped at a procession of slaves at Hafiz market. He was no better.

Hakkan was friendly with the local headman. He allowed the slaver to make camp within the walls of his estate – his guards erected their tents, his slaves kept in the stables with the livestock. The only exception was Rabbit and the three youngest of the female slaves, who were ordered to attend Hakkan, his two captains Mehmoud and One-Eyed Wadja, and the headman himself in his private dwellings. Rabbit served them wine with an embossed silver ewer as the slavers engorged themselves on a suitably delicious meal of flatbread stuffed with minced beef and carrots.

Mehmoud had his eye on Rabbit the entire night.

“Keep your wits about you,” said the Headman to Hakkan. By the tone of his voice they were old friends (or so Rabbit judged). “Have you heard the rumours?”

“What rumours? Enlighten me.”

“They say that the king has levied a slave tax on all caravans passing through his desert stronghold of Qasr Ghazna. Twenty silverlings per head.”

“Pinching bastard!” spat Mehmoud. “How have the merchant’s guild allowed this?”

“I doubt they have any say,” speculated One-Eyed Wadja. “I’d bet the moon that Tehraq’s coffers were empty after the king’s campaign against that Jafari bitch queen – which makes matters harder for us.”

Mehmoud frowned. “How so, Wadja? What raises the need for slaves greater than war?”

“You fool,” spat Hakkan. “War is the enemy of trade. It disrupts the market and makes buyers nervous. But never mind. We will not caravan in Qasr Ghazna. We will bypass it.”

The Headman frowned at the notion. “With largely Kushwari stock?”

“State your meaning,” said Mehmoud.

“My meaning is obvious. The Kushwari are a mountain people, pale-skinned and acclimated to the cold. Why do you think those black-skinned Jafaris sell for a higher price at market? Kushwaris are not suited to desert travel, my friends. Bypassing Qasr Ghazna means going without fresh water for at least three days. How many of your slaves will survive that?”

The Headman extended his empty cup for another refill of wine. Rabbit did not notice – not until One-Eyed Wadja growled lowly and cracked his whip.

“Boy!” He spat. “Your _better_ requires refreshment.”

Frightened, Rabbit quickly poured the Headman a full cup of wine. Then (rather than wait to be told) the boy refilled Hakkan and Wadja’s cups as well. When he bent over to refill Mehmoud’s cup, the lusty slaver slipped a hand up the boy’s buttocks. Rabbit winced.

“Good boy,” he said.

Hakkan frowned at him. “Mehmoud. Keep your hands to yourself before I _cut_ them off. I want these slaves delivered to Qazyr untainted. Understood?”

“Understood,” the gold-toothed man grinned. “I was never taught much etiquette, I must admit…”

Rabbit spent the rest of the night serving wine and sweetened dates after their supper. As a reward for his labours Hakkan allowed him the leftovers of their mince and bread (though it was cold by such time). Rabbit ate well of it. He was even allowed to sleep indoors (although this was more Mehmoud’s doing) but only in the slave quarters with the manor’s other servants.

As before… his dreams were troubled.

Hakkan’s slave caravan resumed its journey at first light. They broke camp, assumed their formations, and marched out of Tangrys with an additional horse and cart to carry an extra supply of water – a gift from its headman. He received only one gift in exchange – the Jafari slave woman that Rabbit met in the silver mine dungeon. He did not know her name. She would never learn his.

The march to Qazyr proceeded regardless.

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

In ancient times the lands now known as the High East were ruled by a powerful dynasty known as the Abyyabids. Their empire successfully unified over 600 tribes across 100,000 parasangs of territory and reigned for over a thousand years before its eventual collapse through war, desertification and plague. The ancient capital, _Yahvat Yahva,_ was depopulated and eventually abandoned. The empire’s sixty-six provinces broke apart and battled each other over dwindling resources. The known world forsook the old gods and descended into an era of chaos that persisted for centuries until the rise of a single warlord flying the black banner of the winged lion in the name of a new god known as Mnenomon – his name was Gurkhan the Great.

Through a complex series of conquests, treaties, marriages and annexations he successfully reunified most of the High Eastern tribes within a mere 35 years. He crowned himself king on his own death bed to ensure that his rule passed to his chosen successor, his progeny, the soon to be King Gurkhan II.

And as was the father, so too was the son. A true devotee of the teachings of Mnenomon, Gurkhan II spread his word by the sword to very frontiers of the High East; from the Black Coast of the south to the Pushan Mountains of the north, and from the Nyssinian borderlands in the west to the eastern frontiers of the gargantuan desert the Tehraqis called the _Bloodsands_. Obsessed with not only fulfilling his father’s work but cementing it in the annuals of history, Gurkhan II re-mapped the landscape by amalgamating the Abyyabid Empire’s sixty-six provinces into twelve dominions. Each city, town and village had a headman, each dominion’s headmen formed a council which reported to its governor, and all twelve governors reported to the king, who maintained their loyalty by creating grand residential palaces for them within the heart of Tehraq and decreeing that they spend a quarter of the year there. _Umayyah-khamat_ , the residence of Governor Ganu, was one such palace.

Though it was the first time that Abana of Hafiz had experienced the dizzying opulence of its winding halls, vaulted ceilings and porticoed gardens; Umayyah-khamat carried with in the same grandiose emptiness that all the other governor palaces did. _‘Wealth without wisdom or point’_ , Lady Yahya once said to the dancer _, ‘it will astound you at first… but once you realize how they fair on the other side of the river… it will nauseate you’_.

It was all Abana could do to suppress those feelings as he was readied for his coming performance by four young slave girls that Governor Ganu was ‘kind’ enough to provide. They were a young and motley group – twin girls of Jamaran origin named Niela and Niesa; a Xianese girl called Xu, and a paleskin called Arwyn (whose name Abana found difficult to pronounce). None had yet broken blood and all were hand-picked by Ganu in another token display of abundance. Variety in one’s slave stock was the height of fashion amongst Tehraqi nobles.

But they were not mere window-dressing. As palace attendants the four slave girls were extremely well trained in the application of cosmetics – Arwyn carefully applied two kinds of ochre (red to the cheeks and blue to the lips) as Xu did the same with a smatter of kohl to his eyes, even as Niela and Niesa worked in tandem to draw the most exquisite and elaborate decorations of henna Abana had ever seen. The designs were Lady Yahya’s and the girls were completely ignorant of the hidden sigils (and their darker magical properties) nestled within the swirls of the pattern-work, but they copied her sketches to the letter. 

The girls were artisans at their craft before they were even women – but none of them extolled any joy in their ministrations.

The girls were young but bore with them the same dejected countenance as any seasoned slave. They did not look you in the eye and they did not speak until spoken to. Not one mote of childish innocence was left in them. They were not yet women, but they certainly weren’t children. Their masters had effectively beaten that precious gift out of them.

Abana was not blind to the distinctions in their treatment either. Ganu’s household left treats for him as well as slaves – dates, grapes, cheese and even an ewer of wine. He suspected Ganu’s plans for the Kushwari dancers (after performing for King Qattullah) would result in marriage rather than chains.

Xu handed him his castanets. Arwyn clipped on his two leather anklets (with three tiny bells attached to either one). Niela wrapped the black veil around his face so only his darkened eyes and rouged nose were visible. Finally, Niesa slipped the sable shroud around his body.

Once Abana was ready the four slave girls excused themselves from the chambers. A few moments passed and then a new figure emerged – a shaved and perfumed Jamaran eunuch, well dressed in a bright turquoise tunic with silver trimmings. His smile was more welcoming than those of other slaves. His craft was etiquette and reception, no doubt.

The black eunuch gave a bow. “May I escort you to the lord governor’s hall?”

Abana nodded yes and followed him through one of Umayyah-khamat’s many tortuous and overly adorned hallways until they arrived at the lacquered doors of Ganu’s hall. Two _Wahdi_ spearmen stood guard. At the eunuch’s ushering they opened the doors and allowed Abana in.

It was even larger than he thought it would be. A vaulted semi-circular chamber 100 paces wide and 80 paces long. Golden sheets and lavish tapestries festooned the walls and intricately woven rugs dressed the floor. Lanterns and burning censers swung from ropes lashed to the ceiling above and flowered the air with incense, air already sweetened to the nose with wine and roasted fowl.

Sitting the other side of the room and encircled by over a dozen of his retainers was the master of Umayyah-khamat and governor of the Wajjashid Dominion, Lord Ganu.

Abana eyed him wearily. He’d heard tales of Ganu. The bastard son of a Tehraqi noble and a Jamaran slave; he had risen from the ignobility of his birth to one of the highest stations of the land by his fierce devotion to the Tehraqi kings and his savage battle prowess. Ganu was a tall man and powerfully built, arms like branches and thighs as thick as tree trunks. In his youth he was one of the late King Gurkhan II’s most feared paladins – and one of the few granted a governorship after Qattullah disbanded the order. 

“Welcome,” said Ganu. His voice was as deep and as smooth as oil. “You are the one who calls himself the Dancer of Hafiz, yes? Show us how the Kushwari dance, little dove.”

Governor Ganu snapped his fingers. The three slave musicians sat opposite Abana (one with a flute, one with a drum and one with a zither) began to play a song. It was a crude one – and purposefully difficult to dance to. It did not matter. The Dancer of Hafiz shrugged off his shroud, pulled off his veil, placed one step forward, and leapt into motion.

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

The headman of Tangrys was adamant Hakkan erred in choosing Kushwari male slaves for the hard drive to Qazyr and time did not drag its feet in proving him right.

Within six days they went from the relatively cool frontiers of the Pushan Mountains to a vast territory of windswept deserts that was the _true_ High East. Its heat was oppressive. Rabbit had never felt anything of its like. This was not the snap of an ember at your fingers on a cold night by the hearth – it was a wall of heat that struck you like a bludgeon and refused to abate. Rabbit and the female slaves were spared the worst of it beneath the hemp sheets roofing the wagons… but it with nothing to do and nowhere to stretch they all felt dazed and lethargic.

It was far worse for the men.

Without shelter from the sun’s bite it was a long, slow march east. Only the more experienced travellers (like Hakkan and his captains) and the male Jafari slaves kept a reasonable pace. The toll was hardest upon the Kushwari males. Rabbit’s people were a mountain people – goatherds and shepherds, milk farmers, crafters and fletchers. They were not suited to these climes (as was the headman’s apt warning). Sweat caked their faces like a sheen of oil. Their movements were slow and haggard; their sandaled feet did not _step_ so much as _shuffle_ them forward. Hakkan had his men whip someone of them to keep up the pace but no matter how many whippings the Kushwari men received he couldn’t drive them along any faster.

This came to a head when one of the rearmost of the enchained Kushwaris, a blacksmith they called Lev, took two final steps before dropping to his knees and collapsing into the sand. The sudden weighty tug pulled down the four other slaves he was chained to until they fell with him. One-Eyed Wadja seethed, wheeling his horse around and galloping back to the rear to crack his whip at their ankles.

“Up, slaves!” He screamed. “Get up now! No stragglers! Move!”

Rabbit watched it all happen from the wagon door. Weakly, the first two of the enchained line stood up, but the middle two only partially so because Lev refused to move. “Disobedient cur…” grumbled Wadja as he climbed off his horse and belted the blacksmith’s back so hard it tore open his tunic and spat a rope of blood into the sand. Yet _still_ Lev did not move.

Curious, One-Eyed Wadja knelt over the slave and placed two fingers against his neck to check for a pulse. Hakkan rode to the caravan’s rear to find out what was happening.

“What is it, Wadja?” He said.

The old boar sighed. “He’s dead, my friend.”

Hakkan frowned. “Worthless fucking Kushwaris. Fine then. Unchain him from the others and leave him for the jackals.”

The key dangled from a golden chain beneath his fingerbone necklace. One-Eyed Wadja leaned over to unlock the iron collar from Lev’s corpse then ordered the other slaves in the line to keep moving. The old slaver climbed back onto his bay mare.

“Hakkan,” he said. “We have weak stock in our hands. That’s the fourth slave we’ve lost in the last two days. These Kushwaris will not survive without more water – I am not pleased to say it, but… if we bypass Qasr Ghazna we will lose half the male herd before we ever bring them to market.”

Rabbit saw the conflict (and the rage) in Hakkan’s eyes. His gaze darted to Mehmoud who held the van from the saddle of his striped zebroid. “What a fool I was to listen to him – “ _poach some Kushwari for a quick turnover at market before the dry season ends_ …” I should’ve trusted my instincts…”

Prince Qattullah’s desert castle was not far. One-Eyed Wadja’s estimate had it at about a quarter of day’s march ahead of them and as much as Hakkan wanted to avoid the slave tax, the excursion into Kushwar would be an abject failure if he lost half his herd to heatstroke.

“We make for Qasr Ghazna then,” he uttered.


	4. Slave's Fate

(Early Summer, 1176)

One-Eyed Wadja’s estimates were accurate. At Hakkan’s command the caravan diverted southwards to the great eastern highway where they joined an ambling procession of other caravans and camel trains funnelling their way towards the desert stronghold. Thankfully for Rabbit and the other slaves, they reached the qasr before the sun hit its apex.

Qasr Ghazna was a fearsome sight. Its towering curtain walls rans for hundreds of cubits in pentagonal shape around the various structures encircling its giant wellspring; inns, taverns, tanneries, butcher shops and bakeries, blacksmith forges, kilns, paddocks, barracoons, barracks, a temple and five watchtowers.

Soldiers inspected each caravan at the qasr gates then demanded a toll relative to its contents in exchange for entry. Hakkan tried haggling with them, but they did not buckle. As the only water source for a day’s ride in any direction Qasr Ghazna was a key checkpoint in Tehraqi trade – and her soldiers knew it. He was forced to pay an even steeper tax than the headman of Tangrys claimed – _thirty_ silverlings per head. Rabbit watched from the wagon as a seething Hakkan ordered two of his men to pay them before the caravan could pass.

The qasr was overflowing with activity in its tightly packed streets – patrolling soldiers marched by bartering merchants and hammer-armed smithies as oaken carts offloaded goods at market stalls. Smoke and sweat scented the air, air alive with a cacophonous blend of shouts, bleating, cheering, and neighing. After the windy silence and whip cracks of the desert, Rabbit found the sudden overabundance of sound almost deafening. He was not permitted to suffer it long.

As soon as the caravan was safely inside the qasr walls, Hakkan split his men into three groups with three tasks. One third (led by Mehmoud) would take the wagons to the wellspring to water the horses and refill their gourds and waterskins. The second (led by Wadja) would take the slaves to the barracoons for the night. The third (led by Hakkan himself) would resupply on weapons and rations in the market. They would regroup at the Dragon’s Breath tavern at sundown for some well-earned roasted chicken and barley beer.

Rabbit and two Kushwari slave girls were spared the barracoons and forced to serve drinks at the tavern instead. Hakkan’s men had a ribald night but there was tension amongst him and his captains – specifically between Hakkan and Mehmoud. Rabbit did not notice as he struggled to avoid both men throughout the festivities, not until later that night when the captains retired to their shared room above the tavern. As usual they brought Rabbit along as their cupbearer and as usual, he alternated between them with a wine ewer provided by the house. The conversation was heated.

“Hakkan. I say we board ‘till dusk and march overnight,” said One-Eyed Wadja. “We’ll lose half a day, but it will be easier on the cattle.”

Typically, Tehraqi caravans travelled at night (for its cooler temperatures) and camped during the day. Until now Hakkan’s caravan had done the reverse – largely to avoid bandits and desert predators, as well as to hone his men’s endurance for future excursions. But even he in all his pig-headedness saw Wadja’s logic.

“Agreed,” yet the slaver seethed. “1500 silverlings this has cost me. We’ve NEVER needed to resupply here. NEVER. This was a waste of time _and_ money.”

Mehmoud, as Rabbit saw, seemed to be aware that Hakkan was sore with him. “A loss it might be, but we’ll recover it thrice over once we finally sell this stock. Only two days march to the next oasis town and after that one more day before Qazyr. We are almost there.”

“1500 silverlings…” Palpable anger lurked beneath the flat tenor of Hakkan’s voice. “…One THOUSAND… five HUNDRED… silverlings. Do you know what that _is_ , Mehmoud? That is one EIGHTH of what it took to raise this campaign. That is one FIFTH of my current coffers and nearly HALF of what my men are to be paid. _That_ is what your blunder has cost me.”

Mehmoud frowned. “ _My_ blunder? How mine?”

“What is not _your_ idea to poach these weak slaves from Kushwar?” said One-Eyed Wadja. “I warned against it, did I not? I said we should wait out the summer to raise more money and men, sail to Jafara in the winter, and then return with _quality_ stock fresh and ready for the planting season. And yet here we are.”

“Why do you always see only the negative? With the money we make from these Kushwari we can fund that journey twice over!”

Hakkan sneered at him. “There is no _we_ , Mehmoud. Once we have sold these slaves at Qazyr, you no longer have a place in my caravan.”

Mehmoud’s shoulders sank. “…What? But…”

“You can keep your sword and zorse, but I’ll be taking from your cut of the profits to help recoup my losses. 20 silverlings shall be your pay.”

And then to Mehmoud a quiet fury of his own was born. “You promised me 300 for this…”

“With the way this has all gone… be grateful I have not divorced your head from its shoulders.”

They all kept their weapons with them even as they retired for the night. Mehmoud’s sickle sword sat in its leather strap lulling about the ground by its curved edge. Abana froze where he stood when, in a moment that could have become extremely bloody, Mehmoud reached for it. A sneering Wadja reached for his dagger but a smirking Hakkan did not budge. His war axe stayed where it was – nestled between his stool and his wine cup.

“…Are you man enough, Mehmoud?”

Silence filled the room… and rage. Rage on all sides. With his hand hovering over his sword’s grip, Mehmoud was close enough to strike Hakkan down with a single swing. He was close enough…

…but instead he spat at the bald man’s ankles.

“May Mnenomon damn you,” he said. The smaller man shot up to his feet and stormed out of the room. The cedar wood door juddered behind him. Rabbit watched Hakkan smirk as though watching a spoilt child abandon his toys in protest. Even his _allies_ were nothing to him.

The more Rabbit saw of the Tehraqis… the less he liked.

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

Governor Ganu’s private chambers were as richly dressed as the rest of Umayyah-khamat. Its walls were draped with expertly embroidered tapestries, earth-coloured silk sheets and mounted ram’s skulls alongside other private adornments from all over the known world; Jamaran stone idols and Northlander silverwork platters, ceremonially-woven Kushwari talismans and jadestone Xianese jade stone magatamas, Nyssinian scythe swords and antique Abyyabid axe heads – treasures of both war _and_ trade. It was as much a trophy room as it was a private dwelling.

_‘Lavish,’_ thought Abana of Hafiz, _‘but all of it has a blood price. How typically Tehraqi.’_

The room was centred by a gigantic four poster bed made of solid ironwood oak and dressed in Xianese silk sheets. It was surrounded by miniature table stands each bearing a separate delicacy for the evening – one for dates, one for cheese, one for peaches, one for cinnamon buns, one for red wine, one for white wine, and so on. More than one person could eat and drink.

The cedarwood door swung open. Abana forced a smile onto his face as a delighted Governor Ganu strode in on sandaled feet. He was dressed as a Tehraqi nobleman ought to be (extravagantly) in his calf-length, gold-embroidered ebony tunic, but Ganu also wore something quite particular to him – a broad cheetah-skin sash clasped by a silver broach set with an amber gemstone in its centre – a defiant tribute to his slave mother’s Jamaran lineage. Abana wondered if that mother would yet love the man her son grew up to be.

The governor took a seat upon the reclining chair positioned beneath the room’s latticework windows. Beyond them was a balcony that overlooked the massive stone garden forecourt of Umayyah-khamat. Without ushering, Abana carefully poured some wine into a golden goblet encrusted with rubies. He gave it to Ganu.

“And for yourself?” He said.

Abana shook his head. “I cannot partake, my lord. I have talents in two dances, and both are better performed with a clear head. But please… avail yourself.”

Ganu smiled and took a sip. “You were magnificent today. The other dancers were talented indeed but your movements… so sublime. Where were you trained?”

_‘In the pit of hell,’_ he thought. “Hafiz, my lord. Our town has a tradition of dance dating back to ancient times. Many of our women were called to perform for the Bans of Kushwar in their day.”

“ _Women_ ,” Ganu scoffed. “Now there is a foul brood. Weak-willed and false of heart in all things… fit for whelping our pups and little else. I’d settle for better company than your Bans desired…”

Tehraqis had a way of commodifying their desires and as well as their distastes. Ganu was no different. He ordered Abana to come over to him.

Lustfully.

_‘Forgive me, Maliq,’_ thought the dancer. Abana did not join Ganu upon that cushioned reclining chair (there was no room to as the governor spread his legs wide) but instead knelt to his knees. The boy pressed his small hands against both those thick thighs, massaging them in smooth, subtle circles before sliding up to Ganu’s hips. Abana held Ganu’s gaze with a well-practiced smile as his hands disappeared into the folds of Ganu’s tunic and untied the dyed loincloth hidden beneath it. The fabric peeled away like a banana skin and a stiff seven inches of warm hard flesh sprung free. Abana pushed Ganu’s robes back until he could see it for himself.

If nothing else the governor was deeply gifted between the legs, blessed with a tumescence much like the rest of his frame – thick and demanding. Abana closed his mouth around its head and watched Ganu’s eyes roll back into his skull.

**********

(Early Summer, 1176)

Rabbit dreamt awful things that night. With a mouthful of blood and smoke he strode through seas of mud in pursuit of some distant goatherd’s hovel. A cruel, father-shaped silhouette threatened to break his bones with his club if he dared find his way out of the mud. And try as he might he could neither reach the hovel nor free himself from the muck. It simply grew thicker and deeper until it slowly swallowed him whole.

Rabbit’s eyes shot open. He gasped and panted for air. Sweat coated his skin. When he moved to wipe it off with a cloth, he found a set of golden teeth glimmering at him in the darkness. Mehmoud wrapped his hand around Rabbit’s mouth before he could scream. The boy then went still as a corpse as the older man drew a knife from its leather.

“Stay silent,” said the slaver. “Make a single sound and I will bleed you like a goat. Do you understand?”

Rabbit nodded yes.

There was a rope and cloth hanging from his belt. Mehmoud shoved the cloth into Rabbit’s mouth (muzzling his frightened whimpers) then bound up his wrists tight with the rope before hauling the boy up to his feet and dragging him away. With the candles and hearth’s fire snuffed, their tavern lodgings were pitch black. Rabbit could not see more than a cubit in front of him. Somehow Mehmoud was unfazed. He punted opened the door and pulled Abana down the stairwell to the tavern floor where Hakkan’s men were all passed out drunk, snoring and flatulating. Mehmoud led the way through their throng to the tavern doors and slowly slipped out with Rabbit onto the streets.

Silent and lowly lit by ensconced torchlight, the streets of Qasr Ghazna were eerily calm that night. Only a few of its soldiers were on patrol – most were sequestered in the barracks or standing guard by the central keep. Mehmoud ran with Rabbit down a back lane behind the tavern and headed east for the stables. They ducked behind a haystack to avoid the small contingent of guards positioned there – but once they moved on Mehmoud dragged Rabbit sixty paddocks down to his beloved zorse, Bahman.

The boy winced as the slaver heaved him up and slung him over the zebroid’s rear like a slaughtered deer. A bloated waterskin warbled next to his head – enough water to last two people for three days of hard riding.

“I’ve paid off a few of the guards,” said Mehmoud, as his fingers stumbled to adjust the saddle. “They will open the gate and allow us to escape. My plan was always to buy you when we got to Qazyr, but thanks to that pig fucking bastard Hakkan we have no choice but to flee. I’ll take you to with me to Tehraq, little rabbit. You’ll love the city…”

Mehmoud mounted up, fixed his feet into the stirrups, and rode Bahman out of its stall towards the hay-strewn yard beyond. The powerful beat of the zorse’s hind legs rocked Rabbit to and fro. He was so terrified he might fall off the back that he shut his eyes and held on for dear life – until the steed stopped.

He opened his eyes again.

Along the road ahead they were cut off by an axe-armed Hakkan, a sword-drawn One-Eyed Wadja, and five of their men armed with recurve bows and a full stock of arrows in each of their hip quivers. _All_ were on horseback.

“Damn you!” Mehmoud drew his sickle sword in response. “Damn you to hell and back, Hakkan!”

The tattooed slaver grinned. “Did you really think you could cheat me, boy? Put down that sword. Get off your horse. Give me that slave. Do that and maybe… just maybe… I’ll let you live.”

There was no way out. With Hakkan and his men were in front and the stables were behind it was hopeless. Rabbit watched Mehmoud shake with rage at his former friend until opened his hand and let the sickle sword fall out of it. It clattered against the hey-strewn flagstones. He then climbed down off his saddle in relent.

Hakkan smirked. “ _Dzungi_.”

It was the name of one of his archers. It was also a command. Dzungi’s bow was so taut it groaned audibly in the still night. The whistling shot that followed was like a desperate gasp for breath – and it sunk home straight through Mehmoud’s neck. Rabbit screamed into the cloth in his mouth as a gout of blood splattered his face. Bahman the zorse buckled. Rabbit fell from the steed and Mehmoud’s glutting corpse landed on top of him. He screamed and struggled free himself from the larger man’s weight, but he was too heavy to budge. Hakkan, Wadja and the five archers all had a good laugh before they finally dragged the gold-toothed man off him.

*

Rabbit never saw someone die before. He had been beaten (and seen others get beaten) but he never experienced that uncanny sight – eyes rolling into the skull and those blood-soaked death splutters. The boy spent the rest of the way to Qazyr in a daze.

Hakkan had his archers sell Mehmoud’s corpse to a pig farmer and divided the traitor’s goods up amongst them as a reward. Dzungi took the zorse. The slavers emerged from the Dragon’s Breath tavern (and a few from the local brothels) re-armed and re-armoured to retrieve the slaves from the barracoons and reform the caravan in the qasr square. Rabbit was only vaguely aware of being loaded into wagon with the women again before it set out at twilight.

The journey was smooth after that.

The caravan moved by moonlight with the stars as their navigation. The Kushwari men took easier to the cooler climes and for the first-time kept pace with the Jafari slaves (as was One-Eyed Wadja’s plan). They marched until daybreak and camped in the shadow of a crag until dusk. Another night’s march took them to the oasis town of Quwayq, a small town with its prime water source brooked by carefully cultivated mangrove plantations. Once their waterskins were refilled and the slaves and horses were watered, the caravan camped outside of town and slept until sunfall.

From then? One last starlit march completed their long trek from the Pushan Mountains of Kushwar all the way to the bustling market town of Qazyr.

Rabbit was half-asleep from the heat when one of the female slaves nudged his shoulder to coax him awake.

“Take heed, little one,” she said. “We are here.”

It was the sounds of the city that hit him first –creaking tavern doors, clucking chickens and dog barks, rolling wagon wheels, flocking tarp; all as the guildsmen strode the laneways with their apprentices and notaries in tow and rotund merchants hollered at passers-by for audience to their lovely goods. Ululating priests extolled the greatness of Mnenomon whilst the city watchmen stamped their sandals through the sandy roads, and woodworkers pounded nails into planks as sellers and buyers haggled to the last silverling.

Rabbit gasped.

Qazyr was his largest town heretofore seen and the chorus of commerce was uniform throughout it. In another circumstance it would have impressed him, if not for the habitual stamp of Tehraqi cruelty that so marred it all.

Everywhere he looked there were slaves.

Slaves of every age, sex and hue – slaves being marched into bamboo cages, slaves chopping wood, slaves washing linen, slaves being whipped. According to Hakkan (who uttered this to One-Eyed Wadja and Mehmoud five drunken nights ago) slaves outnumbered freemen 3 to 1 in Qazyr, and although most brought there were sold to buyers from other cities in the High East (most notably Tehraq), thousands more were purchased to solely to serve in the households of the local guildsmen. As Rabbit would one day learn, the Master of the Slave Guild, Abyad e'Dur, boasted a slave staff of 80 men and 140 women at his private manse. Qazyr, to its core, was built upon the bones of the slave trade.

The barracoons were on the edge of the city, none too far from the other livestock paddocks; horses, zorses, goats, cattle, chickens and pigs due to be re-sold in the central market plaza. Hakkan ordered his men to herd his slaves into the makeshift caging area, all fifty of them, and there they were left to ponder, idle, cry and rest.

Sometime later Hakkan reappeared with a wealthy merchant; pointed toe silk slippers, gold rings on every finger, a flowing multicoloured tunic striped in black, red and green – and a gaudy grin. Rabbit and the other slaves watched Hakkan present them to the merchant like an apothecary shilling the potency of his turmeric.

“Fine stock,” said the tattooed cutthroat. “Fresh from Kushwar, watered daily, barely a scratch on them. As is your wont I spared the women the lash _and_ the road. I am willing to part ways with all of them, Dhabr.”

Dhabr the slave dealer eyed the slaves through the cage’s plank. He focused on the women (and Rabbit). “I have a contact in Jawwaz – the steward of the governess’s household. He says she is in desperate need of new staff – and I’ve been seeking closer ties with her for over a year.”

Hakkan blinked. “You mean Governess Yahya? I heard that she does not keep slaves.”

“She doesn’t,” said Dhabr. “She buys them, frees them, then permits them to stay with her as servants. How King Qattullah abides by such sentimentality is beyond me but a woman is a woman. And business, as they say, is business. What skills do these slaves have? And do not lie to me, I always have them demonstrate their talents before I put them to auction.”

“I’m glad you asked my friend,” Hakkan pointed to each of them in the barracoon as he and Dhabr strolled by its bars. “That tall woman over there is Kumara, a good seamstress I took from a paupered guildsman. The twin girls Abi and Abi’a are both skilled herbalists who learned under the finest apothecary in Kushwar. The girl with lazy eye is Pumela – a bit ugly but a fantastic cook, your buyers will love her spiced chicken and rice bowls! The boy next to her we call Rabbit. Fluent in written and spoken Tehraqi with a good head for numbers – and very pretty for those so inclined. Marara the short woman is a dressmaker and those Jafari girls in the back are all either washerwomen or wet nurses – they have no tongue for Tehraqi, but they respond well to simple commands and a good slap. Now wait until I show you the men! They-”

“Enough,” said Dhabr. “I will take the women, the boy and those six Jafari men over there. The rest I have no use for.” 

The bald slaver’s eyes bulged. That was _not_ what he wanted to hear. “But Dhabr, those men are-”

“Kushwaris. And weak ones at that. I am an old hand at this, Hakkan. I assure you that those… fletchers and bakers would not last fifty days on a plantation. But I am nothing if not a generous man, so my offer is this – 3250 silverlings. 200 per head for the Jafari men, 150 per head for the Kushwari girls, 120 per head for the Jafari girls and 100 for the Kushwari boy – and you will not be paid until I inspect them. Take it or leave it.”

Abana watched Hakkan’s fist quake. The slaver was twice the merchant’s size, but it did not matter in this realm. In this realm power resided in ledgers and abaci, not swords and whips.

“…Fine,” spat Hakkan. “And what do you expect me to do with the rest?”

Dhabr chuckled. “Set them free? Chop them up for pig’s feed? The choice is yours, my friend!”

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

Droplets of sweat ran down a satisfied Ganu’s breast and brow. As he reached for a cloth to wipe himself off, a doting Abana of Hafiz nestled next to him with a silver platter full of grapes. Abana pulled a broad and saccharine smile as he fed the Governor with them.

“Did the dance please my lord?”

Ganu grinned. He was still out of breath – his stamina-filled warrior youth long behind him. “If there was anything that could surpass the one that came before it, it was that. Treasures like _you_ are wasted in Kushwar.”

_‘And why is that for men like you to decide?’_ “You flatter me. It has always been my desire to come to Tehraq and be in the company of great men.”

“You _do_ take to this life well,” said Ganu. “After King Qattullah’s banquet he will give the other governors their choice of dancer – for the right price. How would you like to be _my_ choice?”

Abana smiled. “Nothing would please me more, Lord Ganu. Let me be yours.”

The lumbering governor cupped the dancer’s chin and snatched a long, hungry kiss from him. “Then so it shall be.”

Bitterblack was a tasteless and colourless poison. It slowly slithered its way through the bodily system and dispassionately broke it down organ by organ. Somewhere out there was Dhabr, the former slave trader, on his way home from a successful trip to the Tehraqi Markets, due to slip into a paralytic coma from which he would never awake. Governor Ganu would enjoy the same experience three days from now – which was more than enough time to get Abana into the Elephant Palace and finally take his revenge against Rahab of Mahmun.

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

They were kept in the darkness until their eyes burned. They saw nothing. They smelt nothing except sweat and faeces. They _heard_ nothing except each other’s mournful wails… and then the door unlocked.

Burly Tehraqi men bearing whips barrelled into the holding cell shouting fiercely for all the slaves to stand up and face the wall. Their chains rattled in unison like a wave of scraped iron. Rabbit was amongst them. He did as the others around him did and kept his nose to the wall as the slave handlers summoned in more domesticated slaves from without – each one with a bowl of warm water and a cloth.

One at a time each new slave was unchained and stripped naked for the old slaves to wash the dirt and sand and sweat and blood from their bodies. As their charges were cleaned off the slave handlers gave them specific orders to adhere to.

“No disobedience,” they said. “Speak only when spoken to! Only move when you are ordered to! Do not look upon your buyer unless he wishes it! _Absolutely no disobedience!_ Look to these slaves who now wash you as an example of your conduct! Silence and obedience. Say it.”

The new slaves kept quiet until the chief handler cracked his whip. “I SAID SAY IT!”

“SILENCE AND OBEDIENCE,” said the Tehraqi-speaking slaves, including Rabbit (who winced with discomfort as calloused hands roughly scrubbed his body). One of the handlers suggested separating the non-Tehraqi speakers from the rest so that the Kushwari and Jafari-speaking bilinguals within the ‘herd’ could properly elucidate these orders. Rabbit was one of those ordered to translate their commands to his countrymen. He would never forget the lifeless looks in their eyes as he explained it all.

Once all the new slaves were washed, dressed in new attire (dyed beige loincloths) and re-chained, the slave handlers herded them out of the darkness into a long stone corridor that rose up out of the earth into a grassless iron paddock roofed over by thatch and lumber.

By Rabbit’s count there were thirty-six other slaves with him – mainly women, girls, and a small group of sturdy Jafari men. Rabbit and the men were kept to the male side of paddock which was surrounded on three sides by tall ironwood walls – the final side consisted of a canopied woodwork stage where Dhabr the slave dealer stood before an assemblage of buyers. He was too far away for Rabbit to hear what he was saying, but he did not need many guesses. Once upon a time a boy named Abana ibn Tawab was taken by his father to see an auction after their servants ran away. They came home with nothing because the bids were too high.

Irony is bittersweet.

One of the three slave handlers standing guard outside of the paddock unlocked the iron door on the male side and strode in.

“You!” He pointed out one of the Jafari men and kept one hand close to his whip. “Stand up now!”

The slave looked confused. He did not understand the command until one of his Tehraqi-speaking kinsmen translated it. The slave stood up. The handler then grabbed him by the forearm, shoved him out of the cage, and marched him up the wooden steps to the stage with Dhabr where he was inspected and sold.

Rabbit’s turn came later.

As with the others, a slave handler opened the iron door and dragged him out of the paddock by the arm. He fought back his tears – for all the world it felt like he was being marched toward the gallows – as he was brought up the auction house steps to Dhabr’s side where he was inundated by a sea of gawking Tehraqi faces. Rabbit froze. Not one glance of pity or shame did he see amongst the dozens of men gathered beneath that stage – only curiosity, lust and dispassionate appraisal.

“And here we have Rabbit, a fine catch fresh from the mountains of Kushwar! Aside from a slight childhood burn on his right shoulder he is completely unblemished!”

Dhabr showed them as much.

_‘…Why…?’_

The boy sobbed as the slave dealer ordered him to open his mouth and show everyone the condition of his teeth. Dhabr span him around to show his buyers the burn mark, then spun him back around and lifted his loincloth to show them all the ‘uncut’ condition of his genitals.

_‘Why is this happening to me…?’_

“Skin fresh and smooth,” said Dhabr. “Not a callous to be found! And as for his skills! Oh, ho, ho! Our little Rabbit speaks both Kushwari and Tehraqi, he can read and write and count as if he were highborn-”

_‘I AM HIGHBORN!’ _

“Let us start the bidding at 250 silverlings, eh? Who will give me 250 silverlings for this handsome and handsomely educated Kushwari boy?”

A wealthy Jafari merchant raised his hand. “250.”

“270,” yelled a Tehraqi man behind him. “I offer 270 for the boy!”

Dhabr smirked. “Ah! I have 270! 270 silverlings for the boy we called Rabbit, but do I hear 290? 290 silverlings for the boy, do I hear it?”

There was a woman amongst the buyers – far to the back and veiled in dark black satin tasselled with gold lace. Her eyes were shadowed with kohl and her wrists and fingertips ornately decorated with henna – a noblewoman.

She raised her hand.

“350 silverlings,” she said. “The household of the Governess of Jawwaz offers 350 silverlings for the rabbit.”

Dhabr smirked privately. “What a generous yet well met offer for the boy of two tongues! Dare anyone bid 380? Does anyone wish to part with a little more silver to buy themselves such a talented young man with so many potential uses! 380, anyone?”

A dark baritone called out, **“500.”**

Gasps. The buyers mulled the offer in hushed tones. Governess Yahya’s proxy sharpened her eyes in fury as Dhabr searched the crowd for the bidder. “Do my ears deceive me or did I hear someone say 500?”

**“You did,”** said the voice. **“I did.”**

The whole crowd of buyers turned to their rear as a mysterious black robed man emerged from the throng. He was tall to the point of lumbering, a head taller than the next tallest man in the group once he stood up. He was dressed from head to toe in pale russet robes like a temple priest but there was no face beneath his shroud – only an smooth ivory mask with an oddly carved mouth; one corner curled up like a ‘smile’ and the opposite corner curled down like a ‘frown’.

**“500 silverlings,”** rumbled his voice. **“I bid half-a-thousand for the Kushwari boy you call Rabbit.”**

Dhabr was stunned. This was not going the way he planned it. “500 silverlings! Do I… do I hear 510? 510 silverlings for the boy?” He looked to Yahya’s proxy for a counter bid, but she offered none – only an angry glance at the masked man outbidding her – and no one else dared follow suit.

“Can no one top 500 silverlings? No one? Very well… sold! To the man in the ivory mask! Now. On to the next slave for sale today. He is a keen warrior from the distant land of Xian who-”

One of the slave handlers took Rabbit off the stage as his tears finally started to fall. Yet he could not help but glance over his shoulder at the ivory-masked man and wonder who it was that just bought him.

*

After the auction Rabbit was held in his own private cell where he languished for over a day as his title deeds were drawn up. It was a small cell – six paces wide, six paces long and just high enough for a man of moderate height to stand. Hay and mice droppings riddled the floor. There was little to do except think and scratch his flea bites. Mostly, he slept. That was what he was doing when his new master came for him. Sleeping. Sleeping until the iron bolts unlocked and the wooden door swung open. Rabbit’s eyes shot open.

The ivory-masked man.

He was too tall by two heads to stand upright in the cell – he had to lower himself to his haunches to meet the boy at eye level. Rabbit shivered – and not from the cold.

He had never been so scared in his life.

**“Fear does not become you,”** claimed the monk-like giant. **“Do you know who I am?”**

Rabbit shook his head.

**“I am Rahab of Mahmun…”** he leaned closer to the boy. **“And you? What is your name?”**

“R-Rabbit…”

Rahab chuckled. **“…No. That is not your name. Your name is…”** There were no eyes beyond the eyeholes of that ivory mask – only a swirling black void swallowing Rabbit whole as he gazed into it. **“…Abana! Abana ibn Tawab of Hafiz… grandson of the legendary paladin Fouzan ibn Mushegh... is that not so…?”**

_‘How…?’_ Abana trembled. _‘How does he know my name…?’_

Rahab tilted his head. **“How do I know your name? Are those your thoughts? A Seer sees thoughts as well as acts. He even sees the histories that birth them. I _am_ a Seer. I am Rahab of Mahmun. And you… _Abana ibn Tawab of Hafiz_ … now you belong to me.”**


	5. The Elephant Palace

(Late Winter, 1179)

The jarring carriage ride rocked Abana of Hafiz from side to side. Despite being ferried by two of Governor Ganu’s finest thoroughbreds the long flagstone road beneath its wheels was cracked and potholed by years of use and abuse. Like much of the city, its paving was hundreds of years ago during the reign of the Abyyabids and was in dire need of repair.

A distinct samite fabric lined the carriage walls. It was spell-woven, a transparent shroud from within and an opaque russet tarp from without. He watched the Kazara River flow by. Boyhood fishermen snatched whelks at its sandy banks as ferryman sailed reed-woven barges across its waters and old men cooled themselves in the shade of its palm trees. It was a whimsical sight in a city that boasted precious few of its like. Abana availed himself of it. Anything to distract himself from the forceful hand slipping beneath his tunic into his under-linens. His whole body tensed.

“My lord-” The dancer was cut off by a smothering kiss, Ganu dragging Abana to him by his jaw and crushing their lips together. His instinct was to pull away, but his body did not heed it, and instead ran a hand into Ganu’s thick black beard and whimpered a coquettish sigh. Years of practice had honed his seduction skills to a poniard’s edge. Abana knew what signals to send.

“Sweet boy,” said Ganu (when he finally saw fit to drag his tongue out of the boy’s mouth). “By Mnenomon’s grace I shall have you again tonight.”

They had danced three times the night prior. The first time Abana’s mouth brought the governor to climax, the second time his hands, and the third time? The Kushwari had fallen asleep foolishly thinking his ministrations were over for the night only to be awakened by the sudden plunge of seven meaty inches into his anus. Abana recalled himself grabbing fistful of silk bedding and crying out into the night as the master of Umayyah-khamat rode him hard in the moonlit shade.

Ganu’s lusts were gormless and persistent – he was like a jackal in heat when his blood was up.

_‘Bastard,’_ thought Abana. _‘Maliq, my love, I pray you yet love me when we finally have our vengeance.”_

The carriage took a hard left turn off the flagstone road by the river then turned east again as it passed by the bustling Azarashapur Market. They were close. Ganu _reluctantly_ let his new plaything go, who took the time to put on his veil – an unkempt appearance upon arrival would be taken as a sign of disrespect.

Beneath the folds of his sable cloak he was dressed in a plum-coloured tunic trimmed with gold pattern work around its shoulders, chest, and sleeves – a gift from Ganu. It was not difficult to feign appreciation with him. Like most Tehraqi nobles he was decidedly susceptible to false smiles (and a warm mouth).

The carriage kept on until the sun hit its apex and turned a final corner into a wide quadrangular sandstone courtyard lined along its high walls by portico columns and palm trees. The horses whickered ahead as the driver brought them to a stop.

“We are here,” said Ganu.

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

**“We are here,”** said Rahab of Mahmun. **“Step out.”**

The four male slaves carrying the golden palanquin slowly lowered it to the ground. At his new master’s ushering, Abana the Slave climbed out of the curtained litter and placed his sandaled feet upon the flagstones of the Elephant Palace for the first time. As he marvelled at the courtyard’s size and its palm trees and its marble water fountains; Rahab lumbered out of the palanquin and with a single clap of his hands had its four slaves quickly carry it away.

Abana dared not look him in the face.

Rahab of Mahmun was the most intimidating man he had ever had the misfortune to meet. At a height of over five cubits he towered over everyone and bore down upon them with that ivory-masked face and its misshapen frowning-smile. His humble auburn cassock (belted at the waist by knotted cord) withheld a gaunt figure right down to his immense bare feet. The only possession upon him was a book: a 500-page text bound by dragon’s leather and kept within a pouch attached to a harness mounted around his waist, a book he would one day know as the _Tome of the Ancients_. Truly, he looked more like a monk than a ruler – but he _was_ the governor of the Yaghazu Dominion, the homeland of the ancient Abyyabid dynasty that was now barely more than a barren desert filled with crumbling ruins.

**“Come with me,”** said Rahab to Abana.

The boy followed his master across the courtyard into a small arched foyer where two others stood in wait for them – a thin Tehraqi man dressed in homespun cotton robes… and a comely, sword-armed Jafari man in riveted plate armour. Both knelt before the Seer.

**“Arise,”** said Rahab. **“Both of you.”**

The two did as commanded and stood.

**“This slave is called Abana, my recent purchase from Qazyr,”** Rahab gestured towards the Tehraqi man. **“This is Ishfan, steward of the Elephant Palace’s slave staff,”** then he gestured to the armoured man. **“And this is Maliq, my captain of the guard. Maliq, your report?”**

He nodded. “Master, the Palace is secure, and I have assembled a guard host for your return to the Sun Court. They await your word.”

**“Good. Make the final preparations then tell the men to await me here in the courtyard. I have some work to complete in my laboratory before I depart.”**

The man called Maliq nodded “yes” then excused himself to depart for the palace barracks. A hushed Abana watched him go.

**“Ishfan.”**

The steward stood to attention. “Master?”

**“Take Abana with you. Show him the palace and his quarters then prepare him for his new duties. I want him ready for service by the new year’s festival.”**

Ishfan bowed gracefully. Although he was at least half-a-century old there was a tell-tale softness to his voice. He was probably a eunuch.

A chill ran down Abana’s spine.

“It will be done, master.”

The steward of the slaves retained his respectful poise and demeanour until the distinctive slap of Rahab’s bare feet took him out of the foyer – then his face turned to Abana and soured.

“You will follow me now,” said Ishfan.

And follow he did… through almost the entirety of the Elephant Palace… and it was nothing if not impressive. Ishfan introduced Abana to its throne room (“Here is where the master receives his guests.”) and its great hall (“Here is where we host the master’s feasts”) as well as its library, replete with hundreds of books, its internally-heated bathhouse, the well, the pantry, the larders, the kiln, the slave quarters, and the shrine. A network of arched corridors interlocked these chambers, their echoing floors paved in reflective black marble.

Like Qazyr there were slaves everywhere Abana looked. They dusted the terracotta idols and polished the floors and kneaded the dough and lit the sconces. They performed their duties like marionettes. No life lived in their eyes.

“There are some places you may _not_ go without permission,” said Ishfan. “The treasury, armoury and guard barracks _especially_. If you are ever unsure come to me first. You will be punished if you trespass whether by mistake or design. Remember that.”

By then Abana had followed Ishfan down an enclosed nook to a beaten wooden door barely hanging from its hinges. The steward opened it and showed Abana to the palace forge – full of tools, anvils, and billows. Horseshoes and sabre blades hung from the walls as the hearth cast its smothering heat upon a burly blacksmith hammering at his molten workpiece before dropping it steaming into a slack tub. Two sweat-soaked slave boys (apprentices of a sort) attended him.

Abana saw hot pincers by the fire.

“W-why are we here…?”

“We _all_ came here at first,” Ishfan pointed at the boys. “Zabaqi and Zaqabi? It is time. Hold him steady.”

Without a word of protest the two slave boys grabbed Abana’s arms and pushed him to his knees. They were too strong to push off. The tears that Abana had held back since his arrival started to fall. “Please! I’m begging you! Please don’t geld me!”

“Calm yourself,” said Ishfan. “You are _not_ being gelded. Tehraqi nobles favour boys with their bits intact.”

“T-then w-what are you…?”

At the slave steward’s utterance, the blacksmith pulled a long metal rod from his forge fires – a branding iron. The smithy boys Zabaqi and Zaqabi tightened their grip as their teacher reluctantly pressed the scorching hot iron onto Abana’s nape. Not even the roar of the forge could drown out the scream that followed.

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

Since the day Abana of Hafiz first escaped the Elephant Palace he knew the day of his return was fore-ordained. Whether for vengeance or by re-capture it was a moment fated to occur – but that inevitability did absolutely nothing to sooth the noxious mix of anger, hatred, disgust, and fear churning in his heart as he beheld that awful place once more.

The sight of it made his slave brand itch.

A grinning Ganu took the younger man’s hand and helped him out of the carriage like a doting husband assisting his wife. The governor was proud of his new trophy – but not proud enough to notice how much this place _disgusted_ him.

The Elephant Palace was much the same as he had left it (imposing and threatening) yet time had wilted its flower somewhat. He saw cracks in those once perfectly attended flagstones and the palm trees were beginning to brown. One of the windcatchers was gone (perhaps destroyed by a sandstorm) but not replaced. Fewer sentries guarded the grounds and those that did wielded the same hand-me-down spears and sickle swords as their predecessors, many of them flaking with rust. The signs of decay were subtle but clear.

Then, as it was a lifetime ago, two figures of the palace household stood in wait for their new guest. Ganu waved for his guards (ten _Wahdi_ spearmen) to see to the wagon and horses before acknowledging the pair.

The first was a powdered and thin-smiled eunuch of Xianese origin who spoke with a well-practiced Tehraqi tongue. “Greetings and salutations, Governor. Welcome to the Elephant Palace. I am Tsun’sen, steward of the slaves. This man with me is Ghassar, our captain of the guard. I trust your journey was pleasant?”

“By Mnenomon’s grace it was swift,” Ganu looked around with slight displeasure. “Have you not yet begun preparations for King Qattullah’s banquet?”

In the days before a Tehraqi palace’s feast its courtyards were typically logjammed with carts full of produce: hundreds of bottles of wine and dozens of barrels of beer; six or seven men’s weight in rice, wheat and potato sacks; terracotta jars full of spices and carcass after carcass of freshly slaughtered animals.

But all they saw today was an empty courtyard.

“Not as yet,” said Tsun’sen. Abana misliked his smile. Years of practice warned him that there was a secret hidden behind it. “Master Rahab is sequestered within his laboratory at present. Preparations will begin at the end of the day once you, your men and the Kushwari dancers have been attended to.”

Abana was not familiar with Tsun’sen. But Ghassar, the Tehraqi-born captain of the guard, he _did_ recall. Fortunately for Abana, Ghassar did not recall _him_. With his riveted dome-shaped helm under arm and his scabbarded sabre rattling against his armour he at least looked the part.

‘ _You finally got the post Maliq never wanted,’_ thought Abana. _‘Congratulations.’_

Ghassar saluted Ganu. “My men are fully ready to co-ordinate with yours in preparation for tomorrow night’s banquet, governor. We are fewer in number since Master Rahab’s ascension as grand vizier but rest assured, we shall not disappoint the king.”

“Indeed,” said the governor. He then coughed suddenly, an oily and wracking cough churned out from his throat – the bitterblack poison was slowly taking effect. “See that my horses are watered… then show us to our chambers.”

*

Ganu had him again that night.

Abana did nothing to warrant it. No faint touches, no compliments, no coquettish smiles – and no sooner was he in their carefully prepared bed then Ganu was on top of him. There were no pleasantries either. The Governor ordered Abana on all fours as he poured oil onto two of his fingers – then carefully prised open the dancer’s hole with them. “Am I not considerate?” He muttered. Abana glanced over his shoulder and watched that barrelled chest rising and falling between heavy breaths. Ganu lined up his girth with that tight pink ring of flesh and thrust forward.

It was over before long. The governor’s sluggish movements grew slower and slower until the exertion begat a coughing fit that forced him to stop. He had Abana pour him some water (which helped control his breathing) then he ordered Abana to finish him off with his mouth – and that helped too. The dancer reluctantly worked his mouth up and down the governor’s manhood until its bell head shot thick ropes of seed into his throat – and a few moments afterwards he was asleep.

“Paralysis will start tomorrow, lord…” said Abana as he slipped out of bed and spat the semen out of his mouth. “And death the day after. Curtesy of Lady Yahya.”

What was left of his clothes lay in scattered puddles across the rugged floor. Abana dressed back into his tunic and sandals before swathing his body in his sable cloak. He then crept out of Ganu’s chambers.

The moon was high, and the guest wing was quiet. Hardly any of Ganu’s men walked a patrol and the few who did were too slow to see the figure darting from shadow to shadow along the corridors of the Elephant Palace. He travelled by its alcoves and blind spots with an unwanted familiarity. Masters often likened their slaves to rats – and who knew a building better than its rats?

Abana snuck out of guest wing and emerged in the courtyard through a hidden passage within the cellars. The night air cooled his skin. Two _Wahdis_ approached and Abana hid himself behind a hey cart until they were gone. He then traced his way around the grounds, moving from the kiln to the barracks to the stables before reaching a secluded spot beneath the eastern watchtower where a mount sun-baked bricks stood. Abana removed them one at a time to expose a hidden hatch which he unbolted and pulled open by its iron ring. The door swung open and a cloaked figure scaled the lengthy rope ladder tracing down to the bottom of the shaft, 20 cubits deep.

Maliq.

When he got to the top Abana threw himself into the swordsman’s arms and buried his face in his armoured shoulder. Jahanshah rattled against his thigh.

“My love!” He said. “I missed you so…”

He held the dancer close. “Are you alright?”

“I am fine. You’re with me again…”

Maliq leaned in to kiss him.

“…No.” He still tasted Ganu’s seed on his tongue and he would not soil their reunion with _that_ vulgarity. “There isn’t time. Between Ghassar’s men and the _Wahdis_ there’s over sixty soldiers guarding the palace – we have to kill Rahab _now_.”

“Very well,” said Maliq. “Are you prepared?”

Abana nodded. “Let us finish this.”

* * *

(Early Summer, 1176)

Until that time Abana the Slave knew little of the concept of sex. That was not to say that he did not have some small conception of it in his mind. He knew (for example) that you made babies with it. He knew that people who sold their bodies for it were called ‘whores’ and he knew that people who hadn’t had it yet (like himself) were called virgins. He once had the misfortune of overhearing his father doing it to his mother. He knew _those_ things.

But… Abana never really _knew_.

The tutelage began a few short days after his branding. He was asleep in his straw cot in the slave quarters when Ishfan dragged him out of the cotton covers and ordered him to go to the east wing’s central chamber after breakfast. “Do not keep the Silk Court waiting,” he said. It was not Abana’s intention to do so. He had seen enough slaves on the wrong side of the whip to know better – he was taken there without quarrel.

What he found defied expectation he did not even know he had. What he found was a court within a court; a sun-kissed peristyle built around the glimmering waters of a reflecting pool. Baskets of plum-coloured desert flowers and intricately carved bas reliefs of ancient goddesses and half-nymphs decorated its walls. Incense fumes flowered the air from golden burners suspended by chains as a beautiful plucked the strings of a harp that an even more beautiful Jafari woman sang to. Four muscular eunuchs stood guard at each corner. The Elephant Palace had heretofore been cold and modestly ornate but _this_ …

_‘What is this?’_ Thought Abana.

He was approached a comely Tehraqi woman in a faint samite dress that did little to shield the buxom body beneath it from view.

“Welcome to the Silk Court,” she said. “My name is Hamami. And you are… Abana, correct? Come Abana, let me introduce you to the others.”

One by one she presented to him the other five members of the Silk Court – a Kushwari harpist named Pasha, a Jafari songstress named Zanza, a Xianese poet named Li and two Northlanders: herbalist Roswyn and her brother Qabus the masseur. And they were all of them beautiful.

“I am to join this court?” Asked Abana.

“If you can,” Hamami smiled sweetly. “We are not like the other slaves here, Abana. Do you know what our purpose is here at the Elephant Palace?”

“T-to serve Master Rahab?”

“Yes, but… do you know _how_ we serve him?”

_‘Tehraqi nobles favour boys with their bits intact,’_ reverberated Ishfan’s words. _“A good head for numbers – and very pretty for those so inclined,”_ Hakkan once said. There was a picture unfolding that he could not see and the more he tried to put it into words the more his words failed him.

Abana shook his head.

“Come,” said Hamami. “You have much to learn.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

Abana of Hafiz stayed within Maliq’s shadow as he crept through the narrow corridors of the Elephant Palace. The palace guard was light that night with patrols of only two men per area per hour, even with the extra men Ganu’s host supplied – the remaining men guarded the palace from without. As soon as a patrol passed them by, they ducked within the shadows of the columns and the archways to evade sight, then pressed on when the route was clear.

Abana and Maliq kept on until they located a niche in the wall hidden behind a moth-eaten standard of the Yaghazu Dominion (a clutched black fist over a red sun). Abana lifted the flag as Maliq pressed six loose bricks in a specific order (5-2-1-6-3-4) and prompted the hidden magical energies within. The arched niche began to glow. Bright white light shimmered through and bombarded the corridor as the wall stones slowly dislodged from each other to reveal a darker, narrower corridor behind it. Maliq took Abana’s hand and led him through. Once they were on the other side the glow subsided and the wall stones re-sealed themselves behind the flag.

It was pitch black within the secret corridor. Maliq drew out the hessian torch from his belt and lit it with some flint. The flames crackled to life to reveal a rotted and half-developed substructure within the Elephant Palace’s walls. The foundational timber supporting its construction were never removed – leaving them speckled and decrepit with wood rot. Spools of rope and abandoned tools littered the dusty floor. There were no signs of life – no cobwebs or mice droppings – not even the vermin could scurry their way in.

“This was the corridor I used when you and I first met,” said Maliq. He held the torch aloft as he led Abana’s way deeper down into the structure. “Lady Yahya learned of its existence by buying the palace plans off a descendant of the original architects. They built it on top of an old Abyyabid mausoleum for disgraced highborns.”

Abana smiled. “That was not the first time we met.”

The corridor carried on for another fifty or sixty paces before turning right into a slight of descending steps planked with more rotted wood. “For you to fret over such things now… stay focused, beloved.”

He had never been so focused his entire life. Since his father’s betrayal all the agony and abuse that Abana endured had led to this moment. This _had_ to be the end of it. It was finally time to settle his debt with the last and worst of his betrayers and torturers – Rahab of Mahmun. Then and only then could he be free to build a new life with the man he loved.

Abana took his hand again.

“Stop.” He said.

Maliq paused. “Abana, what is it?”

Their fingers still intertwined, the Kushwari dancer leaned up to the tips of his toes and brought his soft lips to those of the Jamaran swordsman.

This time, he could not resist.

“I _love_ you,” whispered Abana. “I love you and only you. Any evil I’ve done… any blood I’ve spilt… all was in service to the life I seek with Khamali Maliq Moromaya.”

“Abana…”

“I could not have done this without you.”

“Yes, you could,” said Maliq. “You are the strongest person I have ever met. Today may end in death… but tomorrow will begin with _life_. Come. Let us go.”

They descended the steps together, hand in hand, and crossed the threshold into a towering stone chamber yet rigged with timber and rope. Along its walls sixteen different archways led to sixteen different corridors extending well beyond the confides of the Elephant Palace. And suddenly Abana understood how well chosen this site was. The mausoleum had corridors extending out into the city reaches which made for perfect escape tunnels.

As they bypassed the central annex and pressed on through a new tunnel, Maliq held the torch higher to grant the way greater light. Together they followed that dank tunnel to another flight of stairs spiralling up towards a wooden hatch in the ceiling. Maliq shoved it. It would not budge. So, he handed the torch to Abana and rammed his armour-plated shoulder into it. The plywood door broke into splinters and its iron lock flew off into the murky flagstones of a new circular chamber. It was too dark to see without light – as soon as Maliq climbed up he held out a hand for Abana and pulled him up.

Then someone’s fingers snapped.

The first sconce came alight with a scouring roar. Then the next. And the next. And then suddenly all thirty scones around the circular room blazed bright, expunging the darkness, and showering the chamber with light. Only then did Abana and Maliq realize they were surrounded. Twenty palace guards armoured in riveted jerkins and iron helms. Their spearpoints gleamed in the torchlight. With his arms folded at the contingent’s rear was a smirking Ghassar – and standing next to him, taller by two heads at least – was the man whose very sight filled Abana’s heart with dread and rage.

Rahab of Mahmun.

**“And so,”** the enormous sorcerer chuckled softy behind his ivory mask. **“The wayward rabbit returns…”**

**********

(Early Spring, 1177)

As was ancient and customary in Tehraq, its citizens commemorated the new year with a three-day celebration. From taverns to temples the city was brimmed with lofty toasts and merriment… and in the year of 1177 no feast was more extravagant than the one Rahab of Mahmun hosted on its final day. But this was no ordinary new year’s feast. Gathered there that day, for the first time since Rahab’s appointment as Grand Vizier, were ten of the twelve governors of the High East: Governors _Zahmoud-Zafar_ of the Shamshad Dominion, _Muza_ of the Nyssinia Dominion, _Marwan_ of the Khrat Dominion, _Yshamput_ of the Lower Pushan Dominion, _Azarajh_ of the Ashura-Kharnankana Dominion, _Shapur_ of the Black Coast Dominion, _Idrisi_ of the Salt Coast Dominion, _Kakkar_ of the Gale Coast Dominion, and _Hamza_ of the Bloodsands Dominion. Only two were absent – Governess Yahya of the _Jawwaz_ Dominion and Governor Ganu of the _Wajjashid_ Dominion – but despite that Rahab had the banners of all twelve dominions hung from the great hall’s walls.

The slaves suspended dozens of golden burners from ropes along the vaulted ceiling to scent the chambers with jasmine and wildflowers. All two hundred of its sconces were lit with tallow candles and its floors adorned by brilliantly embroidered rugs, tasselled throw pillows and velveteen reclining chairs. All three of its massive lacquered tables (each one big enough to seat sixty nobles) were full to a man with an abundant banquet laid out before them with treats and delicacies from across the High East and beyond; minced beef and dumplings, flatbread, salted chicken breast portions and guineafowl thighs, wild rice by the bowl, chickpea and lentil mash, braised flamingo smothered in date sauce. Dozens of silver platters boasted cheese wheels, raisin bread, cinnamon buns, peaches, apples, and grapes. Water was at hand by the ewer – as was freshly brewed beer and wine.

It was such an overwhelming event – the laughter, the chatter, the songs, the music, the dancing, the sweet scent of wine and food. It the largest feast Abana the Slave had seen but he was given little time to admire it… as he and four other slaves danced for their master’s honoured guests. Even as he twirled and pranced behind Tamami’s lead (it was hers to lead as no one in the Silk Court was as fine a dancer as her) he broke the trance from moment to moment to eye the spectacle – knowing full well that as a slave he was permitted to enjoy none of it.

Aside from Qabus all other members of the Silk Court were in attendance; Roswyn fed dates to the loud and rotund Governor Zahmoud-Zafar whilst a giggling Zanza and Li clung to the wiry embrace of Governor Shapur. Pasha and her flute sat with a trio of Tehraqi musicians – a man with a zither, another with a hand drum and the last with a harp – providing music for the festivities. After the last dance they switched songs to something more luxurious, _Siren’s Sigh_ , a song only Hamami knew the steps to. Abana and the others stopped to light applause. From the corner of that bustling hall he saw Ishfan waving for him and the other dancers to attend the governors and their wealthy retainers. As soon as he caught his breath Abana grabbed a grape platter went from man to man offering further refreshment to their guests.

“Wonderful!” Said the aging governess Yshamput, “You’ve put on a fine feast for us here today, Lord Rahab! This wine alone is exceptional!”

Rahab, seated at the head of the long table upon a small lacquered stool, nodded to her. **“Your compliments are warmly received. My only regret is the absence of Lord Ganu and Lady Yahya, and of course his majesty.”**

“Ganu is with the king, leading the fray against that pocket of rebels in Jafara, no?” said Idrisi. “And what of Lady Yahya?”

“Still licking her wounds in self-imposed exile,” said Marwan. “She hasn’t set foot inside the capital since she fell out of favour with his majesty. I think-”

Marwan paused as Abana passed him by with the grape platter. He offered some to Governor Hamza (who refused, citing a bellyful of pheasant meat and rice) and then to Marwan who took a whole vine for himself before sending the boy along with a slap to the arse. Some of the others chuckled. Rahab observed closely.

( ** _‘Marwan favours you…’)_** Abana’s spine froze. Little frightened him more than when his master projected thoughts into his mind. ( ** _‘Indulge the pervert.’)_**

“M-my feet are tired from the dance, my lord governor,” Abana painted on his best smile. “May I sit with you a moment to recuperate?”

Marwan patted his lap. “Indeed, you may…”

The seat was warm and (if the rumours were true) notoriously receptive to boys and men. Abana felt the governor’s swollen manhood rub up against his backside as he sat down on it. Marwan’s lusty groan filled his ear as he looked to Li and Zanza playing the part of tittering bed wenches to Shapur and followed their lead. He giggled like they did, smiled like they did, and fed Marwan his grapes with the same teasing playfulness that they were so well practiced at.

“Is there any word on when King Qattullah is set to return to the capital?” asked Governor Idrisi. “Sustaining Tehraq’s slave stock and reining in Kushwar were doubtlessly important moves but there are other matters to attend to. The bad harvest has lowered the food reserves in my dominion and dissidents are growing restless. They protest openly in front of the Mnenomonic temples and no matter how much you beat or torture them they keep coming back.”

Rahab mused on this news. **“You think the king’s absence emboldens them?”**

“Indeed, it does,” quoth Zahmoud-Zafar. Roswyn played kittenish games with his bushy grey beard as he spoke. “I have similar dissenters in Shamshad. They call themselves the _True Sons of Mnenomon_ and I fear their zealotry is infectious. That infection must be cut out, Lord Rahab… but we cannot do that with half our armies abroad.”

**“…Your concerns are heeded,”** said Rahab. **“I will send word of this to the king and ask his return to Tehraq. I shall also assign additional soldiers to your dominions to sustain you in the interim. I can spare 500 men for each of you but no more. Do with them what you will.”**

“Most generous, grand vizier, most generous!” It was Muza, governor of the Nyssinian borderlands, who said it. Nyssinia – the old fiefdom of Fouzan ibn Mushegh; Abana’s grandfather. Abana could have been in Muza’s place if the gods had not seen fit to make it otherwise. “It has been many-a-year since our noble King Qattullah felled the Black Bitch queen Hamra lo’a Daiira and ended the slave drought! Now he has brought Kushwar into the fold! Let him return home as the glorious hero he is!”

**“Indeed,”** Rahab raised a cup. **“To the king.”**

“TO THE KING!” Cried the governors.

The feast was not unguarded. Four spearmen took the hall’s four corners and Maliq (tall and dutiful in his red silk and riveted armour) kept watch from the main doors. Abana caught his eye for a moment, just a moment, before he looked away.

_‘It is as though I am the only one you cannot see,’_ thought Abana. He wondered (and not for the first time) what the Jafari guardsman thought of him… or so he did until Marwan’s sweaty hand reached inside of his linens and groped him.

It was like that for much of the night. The governors gorged upon wine and politics and nubile slave flesh as the feast went on into the faintest hours of the night before slowly ebbing down. When the music stopped the dancing and drinking stopped by then most of their guests were asleep. Ishfan ordered a retinue of male slaves to clear up the mess, all the smeared plates, platters, and empty ewers. Fowl bones, pips, grape vines, and plum stones littered the floor. Abana wanted to help (or go to sleep), anything to get away from the inebriated Marwan but the Governor of Khrat had only seen fit to let him go once that night – and that was to relieve his bladder.

**_(‘Take him to his chambers and ride him’)_** , spoke Rahab of Mahmun into Abana’s mind. The seer sat at the foot of his long table as Zanza, Li, Roswyn, Hamami and Pasha were doing the same with their own respective governors. The boy had no choice. He helped Marwan to his feet and followed the others out of the great hall and towards the guest wing of the Elephant Palace.

His room was at the end of the corridor, giving it a beautiful moonlit view of the rear court. A four-poster bed draped with silken coverings occupied the room’s centre. Water and wine were left for him (as were spare clothes and boiled cloths). Abana lumbered Marwan over to the bed where he flopped over like a caught trout. His eyelids lulled shut. His breathing was deep. He looked like he was asleep.

Abana perked. Maybe he did not need to do this. Maybe the lord governor was too tired from too much wine. But when Kushwari boy went to leave a firm hand pulled him back by his wrist.

Abana gasped, landing back first into cotton sheets and tasselled pillows. The bed groaned beneath shifting weight as Marwan climbed on top of him and crushed their lips together. The kiss was not tender. It was brutal and smothering and Abana wretched at the taste of beer and beef as Marwan’s tongue sank deep into his throat and muzzled his whimpers. It was so sudden and so forceful (and so unwanted) that Abana could not help but try to push him off.

A small pair of hands shoved Marwan back by the chest and dislodged his lips from the boy’s mouth. The governor’s eyes sharpened. Only _then_ did Abana realize the gravity of the mistake he had just made – a _slave_ refusing a highborn Tehraqi nobleman his nightly due.

“Milord flustered me…” he muttered. “I-I meant no disrespect…”

The Governor of Khrat was no longer interested in pleasantries or flirtations. With a frustrated growl he flipped Abana from his back onto his belly, kicked apart both his legs, and held down his thin wrists with a single veiny hand. Abana could not move. He barely heard anything over the blood pounding in his ears. All he saw were the silk white sheets smothering his face. All he felt was a bite of cold air as the lower half of his clothing was torn off his hips – and then Marwan’s bell-shaped head, slickened with spittle, split open a tight ring of wrinkled brown flesh. It was all Abana could do to grab fistfuls of the sheets and scream into them as the governor ploughed inside him.

_‘Your virginity is a veil,’_ Hamami said this during his courtesan training. _‘And somewhere out there is the man who is destined to strip it away from you. Prepare yourself and be ready.’_

The Silk Court showed him what to do. How to tease, how to stimulate, how to control his breathing, how to relax his muscles to accept a man’s girth… he even practiced it on a lacquered effigy with an eight-inch phallus. The Dance of Flesh was like any other dance, with cues and steps and beats. He thought he was ready.

But he wasn’t.


	6. Metamorphosis

(Late Winter, 1179)

Rahab of Mahmun.

Two long years had not changed the sorcerer at all. He remained tall and imposing, still radiating menace, his voice smouldering like coal behind that ivory mask and its lopsided smile – with that gods forbidden Tome of the Ancients still clutched jealously to his person. Abana and Maliq were surrounded by an armed guard of over twenty men and the unarmed one was by far the most dangerous.

**“Welcome home, slave.”** said Rahab. **“Welcome home.”**

Abana felt the knife burn a hole in his robes. It was as if the enchantments had tied it to his rage. “This is NOT my home and I am NOT your slave! Not anymore!”

**“And yet here you are with my brand upon your neck…”** he looked to Maliq, **“And you. To think you were fool enough to return too. Do you think serving Yahya makes you any less of slave, boy?”**

A clink of unsheathed steel. Maliq drew Jahanshah and stepped into his fighting stance unperturbed by the sorcerer’s words. “We will not hear your poison. We are here to kill you, Rahab!”

He chuckled. **“…I know. Come and try.”**

Maliq growled his war cry and charged forth. A seething Abana drew his kidney spike and followed him. Rahab did not flinch.

It was a simple spell. Magical light followed the path of his fingertip as it carved runic shapes into the air and forged a bright white sigil. He held its form for but a moment, then with a single push Rahab cast it forth at his attackers. It passed over Abana and Maliq like a wave, like they were diving into water, and as its surface broke, they were frozen mid-lunge, weapons aloft and faces contorted with silenced rage. Rahab smirked. Ghassar and the armed guards around them looked on with awe at the two would be assassins frozen in the air.

**“Step back, men.”**

They did as commanded and widened their circle around him. Rahab stepped forth and slapped his fist into his gauntleted palm. A snap of energy broke the instant of time Abana and Maliq were frozen in, tossing them off their feet and knocking the weapons from their hands. The knife and the sword clattered loudly to the ground as the lovers toppled over.

_‘W-what happened? We were running and then- ‘_

**“And _then_ you were on the ground?”** Abana looked up and saw Rahab of Mahmun towering over him. **“Slave. Many people far greater than you have tried and failed to kill me. I am insulted that _this_ is the best the governors could think of…”**

Maliq blinked. “…You knew?”

**“The arrogant never hide their trail. Consider this. When Yahya grew too influential at court, they conspired against her to appoint me as Grand Vizier. Would it not… behove me to prepare for and forestall a similar fate…?”** Rahab dropped to his haunches and glared at Abana, tilting his head like an owl. **“I embed my mind in the souls of those I enslave. That brand on your neck does not merely mark you as my own – the symbol itself is a conduit for my psyche. Its range is not limitless… but the moment you set foot in Tehraq _your_ thoughts became _my_ thoughts. Yes. I can see into your memories, ‘Dancer of Hafiz’. I can see you poisoning Dhabr and Ganu. I can see you ordering that little boy’s execution. I can see your _patricide_. All that death… all that skulduggery… and yet here you are again… beneath my heel. I could have you killed right this instant.”**

Abana glowered at him. He would give Rahab the satisfaction of hearing him say _do it_.

**“However,”** a white-hot aura manifested around the sorcerer’s body. Its tongues lashed at the black air like fire, **“I have a proposition for you…”**

**********

(Early Spring, 1177)

_‘I want die…’_ thought Abana the Slave. _‘I should have died.’_

Other members of the Silk Court came to check on him over time. Hamami was the first. She gave him some encouragement and fresh blankets. Zanza brought a kiss and some wine. Roswyn re-dressed the flower baskets around his room with healing fragrances. Pasha and Li convinced Ishfan to waive his other palace duties until he recovered. But it was Qabus who stayed by his side. He performed a healing ablution with incanted waters, lit sticks of incense and brought baked bread and smoked fish (which Abana only ate a bit of).

Abana laid flat upon a cushioned stone bench in the centre of the Silk Court’s healing room. Qabus swathed him in a long samite cloth from slave brand to anklets. The Kushwari boy did not move and he did not speak. He just watched the still waters of the Silk Court’s reflecting pool through the doorless archway.

“It gets easier,” said Qabus. His was an accented Tehraqi but a strong one. “…Over time.”

Abana said nothing.

The Northlander had a washing bowl at his side sodden with blood and faecal matter. He disposed of it and returned with fresh water. “I was your… predecessor in this. When Master Rahab was a scrivener… he served me to the magistrates. And when he was a magistrate… he served me to the governors. And by the time he was a governor… I was too old to suit anyone’s taste. I was… thirteen when the master bought me. And now I am twenty-nine.”

Abana said nothing, only listened, as Qabus rang a new cloth over the water bowl. “I once tried to end myself. I failed. And then I stopped. And I listened to the heartbeat of the world… and found strength to keep me up and keep me whole. I found the Word of Mnenomon.”

Abana sighed.

“All is balance. All is order. All is Mnenomon’s will. If I am a slave in this life, I will be a king in the next. Only by taking my life would I disrupt that cycle. Abana, you understand, don’t you?”

He kept silent.

“The others do not,” Qabus slowly peeled back the samite and wiped away the blood traces around Abana’s hind quarters. “They will not heed Mnenomon’s word. We are all of us slaves to prophecy. As it is written in the Book of Mnenomon, so it shall be.”

There was not much blood left. Qabus soaked the cloth into the bowl and withdrew a small leather pouch from his pocket. He placed it in Abana’s hands.

“W-what… is this?”

“This is but one of Mnenomon’s many gifts,” said Qabus. “Jinn Powder will ease your anxiety and dull your pain until riding the camel becomes second nature. Take it when you need it.”

Abana glared at the pouch. In another life a happier boy was raised to be wary of alchemists and their drams. _What nature gives it also takes_ , went the saying. No matter what the effectiveness… there was always a cost. But… he could not endure another night like last night. If this jinn powder was the only way…?

Abana’s clothes were tucked up besides the stone bench. He hid it inside their folds and thanked Qabus for his ‘gift’. Qabus told Abana to thank Mnenomon rather than him.

Outside the healing room Roswyn tossed fresh rose petals into the reflecting pool only to stop suddenly and bow. A Jafari eunuch standing guard did the same. Then Qabus quickly took a knee as Rahab of Mahmun shuffled into the healing room. He was so tall he had to lower his head beneath the archway to just to enter. His Tome of the Ancients swung close to his waist from its leather strap.

**“Qabus, leave us.”**

The paleskin man nodded and excused himself. Rahab’s mask turned to Abana who froze in his very flesh. He felt the hairs across his body stand on end. He had met frightening men in the past, but none frightened him more than Rahab of Mahmun. **“I spoke to Governor Marwan. He said the slave I sent to tend to his needs last night was unruly and inartful. Is this true?”**

Abana bit his lip. He felt like an errant bread thief confessing his crimes to a magistrate. “I-I-I’m so sorry, Master Rahab, it was not my intent to…”

The Governor of Yaghazu tilted his head to the side in that owl-like way of his. His shadow swallowed up the whole bench. **“…People are wont to see rhythm in their lives… but there truly isn’t any. Order is restricted to the controllable… and all else is chaos. Do you understand, slave?”**

“N-no, master…”

**“Come,”** Rahab turned his right-hand palm-side up and raised two fingers into the air. **“Let me show you.”**

The magics that slowly lifted Abana into the air were sightless, soundless, and touchless. He felt no tingle on his skin nor any invisible hand raise him up, he felt nothing at all… until Rahab closed that hand into a fist. The lightning hit him instantly. The spark, the ignition of his blood, the screaming snap of energy surged through his entire body and set every receptor capable of pain alight. It felt like being thrown into fire. Abana’s eyes bulged out of his skull and his jaw cracked open so wide his screams thundered throughout the entire Silk Court. Abana twisted and writhed and screamed and screamed and screamed until his throat was hoarse and all saw was the blinding white explosion of raw magical energy bombarding him into submission until his brain finally caught up to his agony.

_‘Stop!’_ He thought. The pain was too blinding and stark to speak it, _‘Stop! Stop it! STOP! STOP! STOP!’_

**“You disgusting people and your worthless obsession with flesh and seed,”** Rahab opened his fist. The thunderous barrage stopped almost as quickly as it started – but the breathless Kushwari boy remained frozen in the air by his master’s magic.

**“I do not understand that urge… and thank the gods for that… but I have found that obsession makes people malleable.”** Rahab leaned into Abana’s sweat-soaked ear. **“I bought you… because there are powerful men in this city whose vision is so miniscule that their sole ambitions in life are to fuck boys and chase wealth. But as much as it galls me to admit it... I _need_ those men... or rather... their _influence_. You are here to placate those men. You are here to ingratiate those men TO ME! But if you cannot do that...”**

Thunder was the roar of the gods. Abana never dreamed he would find it in the palm of a man’s hand. He tried to thumb the drool off his lips to speak and to beg his master not to hurt him anymore… and yet he was utterly dumbfounded as a burning and blood-eyed white shadow loomed up behind Rahab’s soaring body. A silhouette of evil light hung there for a moment like a phantom, smiling at the boy, daring him to look away. Abana blinked. And then it was gone.

Rahab lowered his fist. A shuddering Abana landed with a wet thud upon the marble bench. His samite cloth fell away.

**“The Governor of Khrat shall wake soon,”** said Rahab. **“And when he does you will bring him wine and baked bread and smoked fish. You will prostrate yourself and you will apologize for your poor manners by treating him to the delights he should have received last night. Am I understood?”**

_‘I wish you would have killed me instead, father, truly I do. I wish you would have killed me…’_ Abana thumbed the tears out of his eyes. “Yes… master….”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

**“Call me master once more,”** said Rahab. **“Take to your knees. Beg my forgiveness and I will spare your lives.”**

All he had endured… all he had sacrificed… all for this one moment. The deer was in his line of sight… and he missed his thrust. How had he come so far only to have it end like this? Abana of Hafiz peered at Ghassan and his twenty men surrounding them with outstretched blades. Even if he and Maliq found a way to get past them there was no defeating Rahab of Mahmun. Their plan was always to poison him in his stone sarcophagus before he woke – fighting him head on was nothing but a last resort.

_‘After all we’ve done…’_ Abana looked to Maliq with a tearful smile. _‘I am so sorry, my love…’_

Maliq kept a relentless eye on Rahab.

**“Did you hear me?”** churning white flames engulfed the sorcerer’s clutched fist. **“On. Your. Knees. Do not waste your lives on petty revenge when you still possess useful talents. Acknowledge me as master and I will be merciful.”**

Abana fixed his eyes on Rahab’s black-void orbs and spat a wad of phlegm at his sandaled brown feet. “ _That_ is what I think of your mercy! I’ll never again bow before a man – least of all YOU!”

Rahab chuckled gravelly. It made Abana’s teeth itch. **“A slave will always be a slave… if not for me then for Yahya and those other dung-wit governors. But I wonder: is your resolve truly so great? Let us plumb the depths of that vengeful rage of yours…”**

The sorcerer raised his hand. As if in reply, Ghassan’s sickle sword flew out of his grasp and landed in Rahab’s fist, as the sorcerer’s free hand twirled its gaunt fingers and dispersed another wave of magical energy that struck his captives numb. Abana froze. Maliq froze. Neither of them could move. And then a familiar cold fear crept down Abana’s spine as Rahab of Mahmun set Ghassan’s sword at Maliq’s throat. **“Declare me your master once more… or I will cut your little black pet’s head off.”**

**********

(Early Winter, 1177)

The Elephant Palace was built atop a sloped hillock that gave it a sweeping view of the southern (lowborn) side of the city, and its watchtowers were the highest points in the palace. Although he risked a beating whenever he tried it, Abana the Slave enjoyed sneaking up into one of those lofty vantage points and observing Tehraq.

There was something… soothing about it.

From up there Tehraq was nothing but its sandy thoroughfares, domed palaces, bustling marketplaces and sweeping sandstone tenements. For all its horrors it _was_ a breath-taking place. For a time Abana observed the city’s splendour and forgot the absolute evil lingering beneath its surface… but then the reality always struck home. The ‘sandy thoroughfares’ running through Tehraq like veins looked impressive… until you pictured _Wahdi_ guardsman forcing war captives and half-lames to sweep out heap after heap of horse dung. Those ‘domed palaces’ hosted tyrannical rulers who sat to opulent feasts as their subjects staved off starvation. Those ‘bustling marketplaces’ were where human beings could be bought and sold like livestock, those ‘sweeping sandstone tenements’ were where the poor sold their dead to pig farmers and bone-mongers for just enough coin to last them another week.

Perhaps somewhere out there was a similar slave boy of a similar age and ethnicity, eye freshly blackened by his master’s fist, looking up at the remarkable Elephant Palace and thinking to himself – ‘ _what would it be like to live there?’_

_‘A great deal worse,’_ thought Abana. He spat out a clotted wad of phlegm and semen over the breastwork, not to be crude but because was he sick of the taste. It was a ‘gift’ curtesy of Khamaj ibn Khaffa, a powerful retainer of the Ban of Kushwar. Master Rahab ordered Abana to attend to him that night. It was not difficult work – Khaffa was not a man of tremendous girth and rather timid in the bedchamber, it only took a few long strokes and a warm mouth to bring him off. Abana waited for him to lull off to sleep before sneaking up to the watchtower for some air. But air (and a good view) was not the only reason Abana came out that night.

That night (as he did every night when the moon was at its apex) Maliq of the Palace Guard came out into the courtyard to train. Shirtless and barefoot the Jafari man twirled his sabre in a series of looping slashes and stances. Abana knew nothing of the sword or its use but he knew a masterful hand when he saw one. He watched Maliq dance with his invisible opponent until the sweat dripped down his muscular torso. He stopped to catch his breath, set the sword down at his feet, then muttered a prayer in a language the boy did not understand to a god that was likely not Tehraqi in origin.

Abana bit his lip.

The Dance of Flesh was a foreign thing to his mind before Master Rahab bought and brought him to Tehraq. Now, as a member of his Silk Court, that dance was his sole purpose. Rahab hosted gatherings for every noble, merchant and magistrate he sought to curry favour with, and each had his pick of the Court to bed. In the year since his arrival at the Elephant Palace, Abana had been ravished by governors, generals, chieftains, judges, mages, stargazers, merchants, quartermasters, auditors, envoys, slavers, priests, and guildsmen.

There were few rules to his (mis)use.

So long as they did not wound or kill him, they had their permission to do with Abana as they pleased. Most were unimaginative and only wanted a quick hard ride with him. Others were sadistic ghouls bent on living out every twisted fantasy their minds could concoct – and those were by far the worst. A Mnenomonic theologian named Argonax made Abana crawl on all fours like a dog and lick his feet. Ghadesh the Horsemaster liked to bring chains and whips into the bed. Magistrate Shahab could not climax unless Abana took _him_ up the rear. Sometimes (after their own seed was spilt) they turned Abana over to their men to use. On one exceptionally long night, an overlord from the barbarous lands of Soth gave Abana to his outriders. Twelve hotblooded paleskin ruffians took turns upon his throat and anus and hands. They took him on his back, and they took him on his belly. They mocked him and beat him and spat on him. They rutted him across the hours until every orifice gouted with seed, and then they circled up and urinated on him. He passed out shortly after. Hours later he woke up where they left him; on a straw pallet in the stables caked in a viscous mask of sweat, semen, spit, and piss.

That was the night Abana would have killed himself just to end it all – his Night of the Outriders – if not for the Jinn Powder.

Qabus’ gift required only a single sniff up either nostril. Within a few moments it turned ugly cretins into handsome suitors. It numbed the pain and heightened the pleasure. It turned painful slaps into gentle tickles and made even the most inartful thrusts bring him to orgasmic bliss. He would be sore and stiff when he woke up the following morning, but in the moment, he felt no pain. In time it trained his mind to endure even the harshest dance partners and extract whatever precious scraps of pleasure he could derive from the experience until he did not even _need_ the Jinn Powder anymore. His purpose was to serve the men his master needed to indulge and so he did. Like marble, he was chiselled mind and soul into the form his sculptor sought to shape.

And that was his life now.

There were some small specs of joy in all the pain. The Silk Court did not suffer the whippings that the other slaves in Master Rahab’s palace did (lest they mark and ‘soil’ their attractiveness). The other members tended to his bruises and aches after rough nights. They were permitted wine and sweet treats such as dates and grapes; and in their free time they could play games, write poetry, and perform music.

The Silk Court also took lovers from within. This was forbidden of course but the eunuchs took a blind eye and if Master Rahab was aware then he did not act on it. They alternated when it suited their favour. Hamami might bed Roswyn one night and then her brother the next. Sometimes tender feelings lingered – Li and Pasha developed a closeness that Hamami warned against before it became too strong. It was often only frivolous… just a tender moment in the night to help each other survive. Abana shared such a moment with Zanza once but felt nothing from it. As much as the Kushwari boy hated the way men treated him, he only had eyes for them.

And for months now he had eyes for Maliq.

Hamami favoured him too (as she often told the others in the Court) but neither of them acted on it. That was a transgression the eunuchs would _not_ turn a blind eye to. They had not spoken much and Abana could not say when it started but he found himself drawn to the stoic swordsman – which was why he risked punishment on nights such as this to sneak out and watch him train.

_‘I wouldn’t need any Jinn Powder for you,’_ thought the dancer. Maliq was an enigma. He was not a slave (un-branded as he was) but he served Rahab without qualm or reserve. Yet he extended kindness to the slaves and chided Ishfan for punishing them too harshly (though Ishfan oft retorted that the slaves were not within Maliq’s remit). It could not have been an act of pure kindness as ultimately the slave staff outnumbered the palace guard 4 to 1, but somewhere in that stolid muscular frame there was a kind heart… and Abana could not help but wonder if there was room in there for him.

A short time later Maliq sheathed his curve-bladed sword, mopped up his brow with a cloth, and made his way back to the barracks. Abana watched him go before climbing back down the watchtower and sneaking back into the guest wing. Khamaj ibn Khaffa was where Abana left him (snoring in the four poster) so he climbed back into bed with him to see out the night.

At first light Abana woke up and fetched a morning meal of fried bread, boiled eggs, and smoked salmon hanks. Khaffa was grateful and ate well of it. Then later (as Abana re-dressed him in his riveted armour and half-cloak) one of the retainer’s riders brought him a missive from Kushwar.

“…Yet another barbarian raid on our northern border,” said Khaffa, balling up the parchment. “I must away. Give your master my regards. I have also left a sealed letter for his attention. Be so kind as to give it to him in my stead.”

It sat upon the scribing desk nearby, sealed in wax. Abana nodded and promised he would deliver it to his master’s hand. Khamaj ibn Khaffa bid him farewell and departed with his men.

The Kushwari boy’s smile fell.

He did _not_ want to see the master now, but Rahab had an uncanny knack for sniffing out disobedience in his slaves. Abana slipped the note into his belt and traversed the Elephant Palace and is long black marble hallways to the ironwood door to his master’s private chambers.

If Abana had known the horror lurking behind that door, he might not have knocked it.

If Abana had known the fate that awaited him when he did, he would have knocked it the day he arrived.

The boy knocked the door.

His expectation was that the door would part open by a fraction of a pace and a blood-chilling voice would ask, **‘What is it, slave?’**

Instead the door swung wide open and Abana was met with silence.

“M-Master Rahab?”

Silence.

Abana had never been inside these quarters. Only a select handful of palace slaves (including Ishfan) had even seen it. Curiosity got the better of him. Abana could not help but peer inside.

“Master Rahab, I have a message for you?”

There was no reply.

When first he saw the bleached skulls, he did not notice his sandals cross the threshold. They were mounted and lined up along the rear wall by order of size from large to small – the skulls of a hippopotamus, a horse, a lion, a human, a dog, a crow, and a gannet. Each were so marked. All the braziers were lit. The master’s chambers sported none of the extravagant trappings customary to men of his station – but rather the oddments and oddities of some sort of scholar of the macabre. Ghastly stone idols sat alongside the foetal corpse of a conjoined twin preserved in a tall jar of formaldehyde. Bookcases as tall as the ceiling stood against the east and west walls – books of sorcery, astronomy, alchemy, and ancient history. There was no bed to speak of. A large table centred the room strewn with hundreds of loose parchment pages displaying hastily scratched notes, diagrams, and equations. The ink block was dry and surrounded by dozens of stained quills.

Abana picked up one of the pages. The master’s penmanship was horrible, and his writings were of another world…

**“…Pity upon those who deny that the teleological principles undergirding both our natural laws and our empirical existence are perceptible (and ultimately quantifiable) by our embrace of the transcendental sciences. We Tehraqi scholars think highly of ourselves but FAR too many of us are afraid to pierce the veil of the unknown! There is no heresy, only utility. I seek only the _beyond_ …”**

It was a stray page from a sheaf of notes tied up by string. His eyes wandered to another page, torn from journal as if in haste.

**“Non-standard deviations in corpuscular structure are congruent with both exposure to lunar radiation and the associated hyleg of parturition. Perhaps a bisection of the cranium will uncover…”**

The sentence trailed off where the page had been torn out but beneath that was a third scrap of parchment,

**“The alchemical calculus of phlogisticated tissue as a by-product of escalation coefficient intensity in necromantic rituals can be represented as Ph = n 3/x. This bitter substance is not to be considered flotsam. Mathematically, not only is its build up perpendicular to the regeneration rate of necrotic matter, but with the right incantations it can also be used as a _catalyst_ for the process itself!”**

The meaning was beyond him. It could have been genius or gibberish for all Abana knew. What he _did_ know was that the tone was unmistakable. Those were the whirligig writings of a madman.

Abana felt increasingly unsafe in those chambers. Maybe it was better to just leave the message here for his master and return to the Silk Court? The boy put Khamaj ibn Khaffa’s message on the table and backed away until he bumped into one of Rahab’s book cabinets. His hand accidentally pressed one of the lodged tomes – _A Theory of Quicksilver_ – and shimmering light surrounded him. The bookcase behind his back disappeared. A startled Abana fell backwards into a dank hidden pathway as the wall reappeared in front of his eyes and solidified into a black marble wall.

“W-what?” Abana scrambled to his feet. “Oh no! What have I done?!”

He slapped his fists against the wall but whatever magics threw him onto the other side, they would not throw him back. _‘This is not good,’_ worried Abana. _‘Master Rahab will punish me a dozen times over if he thinks I was intruding in his chambers…!’_ He had to find his way out before the sorcerer returned. The corridor was dark but there was only one way forward. Abana put a hand against its dank walls and followed the path. It led to a flight of stone steps that descended into another long, narrow corridor. But unlike the one above this one had a sparkle of light at the end.

_‘A way out maybe?’_ He thought. 

The boy followed the light. As he drew closer and close to its source, he overheard a familiar voice:

**“Lo, Great Kafnak of the Eighth Throne! The Starfallen One, the Bane of the Abyyabids! Here we stand as supplicants to your might! Hear our cry!”**

A unified chorus of monotone voices chanted back, “WE BOW BEFORE YOUR GREATNESS FOREVER AND ALWAYS.”

Abana huddled down and made it to the source of the light. He emerged upon a large stone balcony running around the upper rim of a domed underground chamber. Its stones were made of pitch-black brick and illuminated by a circle of burning metal braziers encircled against the walls. The dank air smoked with frankincense and animal bones. A shadowy congregation of worshippers in hooded cassocks gathered around an ebony marble plinth more than thirteen cubits tall. Atop it a reverent Rahab of Mahmun stood and led the unholy chants as another worshipper knelt by his side. But unlike the others this one had his hood lowered… and Abana could not believe who it was.

_‘Qabus?’_ He thought. _‘What’s he doing down there?’_

Rahab drew a knife. **“Great Kafnak! Progeny of the Stars! We are your VESSELS upon this earth! Take this soul as our tribute to your power!”**

“TAKE THE SOUL AND ABIDE WITH US,” said the congregation. Qabus said not a word. He did not move or argue. He did not even look scared.

_‘I was… your predecessor in this.’_

Abana watched horrified as Rahab’s robed body began to burn in tongues of white-hot flame. The burning ‘white shadow’ that the boy once saw emanate from his master’s body in the Silk Court reappeared – twice as large as before. It engulfed the entire pedestal and flooded the chamber from its floor to its dome in ethereal light.

_‘And by the time he was a governor… I was too old to suit anyone’s taste…’_

Through squinted eyes the Kushwari boy spotted a sudden blot of blood in the air – and then Qabus, eyes glazed over, fell out of the heart of the light. His throat was cut.

“NO!” 

A hand clamped around Abana’s mouth. As the light of Rahab’s burning white shadow began to ebb and the blood of Qabus the Slave spluttered out of his gaping wound, a strong arm dragged the Kushwari boy away from the balcony and back into the safety of the shadows. Abana turned around.

It was Maliq.

“That wasn’t for you to see, little one.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

Abana of Hafiz felt his heart thumping inside his chest as the evil sorcerer Rahab of Mahmun held the sabre against his beloved Maliq’s throat. The blade was close enough to draw blood and indeed a bead of it trickled down his neck onto his chainmail. Rahab meant every word. He _would_ kill him.

**“I will have your answer,”** said Rahab. **“Return to me or this man dies.”**

The dancer’s fist trembled with scarcely suppressed rage. _‘That mask…’_ he thought wrathfully. _‘Those eyes… that voice…’_ Abana tasted his hate for that man like bile in his throat. He hated him. He HATED him. _Rahab of Mahmun._ The man who bought him like livestock. The man who had his servants brand him. The man who whored him out to his guests. The man who tortured him. The man who murdered his friend. The man who threatened the life of the only man he had ever loved – the only man he would ever love. _Khamali Maliq Moromaya._ The _only_ man that ever protected him. The _only_ man who ever loved him. The only _man_ ever willing to fight and die for him. What was revenge if he could not share it with Maliq? What was the world even _worth_ without Maliq in it? Without Maliq… none of this was worth any of the price.

Rahab had won.

But the second Abana moved his lips to acquiesce, Maliq glowered at him.

“Don’t,” he said sternly. “Do _not_ give him the satisfaction. If we die, we die with honour… together.”

A single tear fell. _‘Oh, my love…’_

**“He, he, he, he, he…”** his chuckles were like a low rumble until they suddenly exploded out of his gravelled throat, **“AHA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA, HA-HA! You two were born under a _very_ obstinate star. It is almost commendable. And it is not without use…”**

“Enough riddle-speak!” spat Maliq. “If you want to end this then _end this_.”

**“I speak no riddles,”** said Rahab. **“And this is not the end. No, not at all. _This_ is the beginning.”**

Abana, Maliq, Ghassar and the twenty palace guards looked on as Rahab of Mahmun tossed away the sickle sword and wrapped his gauntleted hand around his ivory mask and pulled it off. The hood fell from his wiry hair as he revealed his face – no disfigurements, no monstrous features – just a face-shaped void of total blackness twirling into itself. His own men stepped back in shock. But ‘Rahab’ did not care as he chuckled manically to himself and stripped away his clothing. He threw off the Tome of the Ancients and tore off his cassock then ripped off his loincloth then jammed his still gauntleted fingers into his barrelled chest and stripped away his own skin like a flayer.

Abana’s jaw dropped.

Maliq’s eyes trembled.

Ghassar and his men, terrified, backed away from their lord as he ripped and tore himself open until a second form emerged from the shredded corpse he made of himself – a red-eyed and man-shaped construction of absolute light stepped out of the bloodied mound of flesh and bone that once called itself ‘Rahab of Mahmun’…

_‘The white shadow!’_ Abana recalled. _‘That same white shadow I saw before…!’_

It had fingers and toes and the appearance of a nose and the contours of a chest. It tilted its head upward and opened its arms as if to breathe in and savour the first gasp of morning air after long night’s slumber. It radiated light and heat. Each of its footsteps evaporated the mucky puddles leaking down from the sarooj cistern in the floor above.

_‘Those eyes…’_ thought Abana. _‘Those bloody eyes…’_

Maliq swallowed the lump in his throat as the creature of light stood before them. “…Kafnak…”

_“Indeed,”_ its voice was ghostly and waif-like. _“Now accept my offer, ‘Dancer of Hafiz’. Or…”_

Kafnak, the creature Rahab once called the _progeny of the stars_ , walked up to the still immobile Maliq, and placed a single fingertip upon his forehead. There was a stillness for a moment. Just a moment. And then a boom. Abana shivered as a burst of light cocooned his lover and bombarded his body from head to toe with the burning, torturous energies of absolute evil. The black swordsman SCREAMED in agony from within, his silhouetted hand scrapping and gnashing at the air as though he were being burned alive.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHH!”

“Stop it!” Abana yelled. “Stop it, stop it, STOP IT!”

The mouthless Kafnak smiled. _“Accept. My. Offer. Or. I. Will. Torture. Him. For. Eternity.”_

“I accept! Just stop, please! Stop hurting him!”

Kafnak withdrew its finger.

The cocoon of light shattered like a glass jar. An unconscious Maliq fell face first into the dank stone floor, limbs flopping limply about the smoked scraps left of his armour and tunic. Abana, now suddenly free of magical restraints, ran to his side for a pulse.

He found one.

Maliq was immobile but he was breathing… and inexplicably unburnt.

Ghassar and his men were gone.

“My love,” Abana whimpered. “I am so sorry; I am _so_ sorry! I could not bear it… I had no choice…”

Kafnak extended its ‘hand’ to Abana. _“You and I shall achieve great things together, Dancer of Hafiz. Let us start with Rahab of Mahmun.”_

“…What?”

_“He is alive…”_ said Kafnak. _“…and vulnerable. I will take you to him.”_

Abana cradled his beloved. “What about Maliq?”

_“He will wake soon. Now that Ghassar’s men have fled he will be free to make his escape. Now come. Rahab is close.”_

There was no choice. At least Maliq was safe this way. Abana wiped the tears from his eyes and laid his love down gently, then kissed him goodbye. Then he rose to his feet and took Kafnak’s hand as a gentle light surrounded his body… and vanished with it.

It would be some hours before Maliq awoke in the tattered remnants of his armour. He would find Jahanshah would be close by, as he would the false Rahab’s mangled remains and the abandoned weapons of Ghassar’s men. He would groan through his disorientation, take up his sword, and then he would notice something else that had been left behind…

…The Tome of the Ancients.


	7. Profferings of God

(Early Winter, 1177)

_‘What in the world?’_ Thought Abana the Slave. _‘What in all the world is happening?’_ Fear and anger conflated into a noxious mix that left the boy a trembling mess. His spine felt cold and weak. His legs would have given out on him half-an-hour ago if not for Maliq, the captain of the guard, dragging him along down one of the many dark corridors etched out beneath the Elephant Palace’s grounds. The dark-skinned man held aloft a torch lit by flint to light their way forward. The corridor was increasingly narrow and makeshift, its walls and ceilings still maintained by rotting planks of wood. Spools of rope and rusty abandoned tools littered the cold stone floor. This was not well-trodden ground but Maliq was sure-footed through it.

“What is going on?” Said Abana. “Where are we?”

“Beneath the Elephant Palace’s old foundations,” as the ground beneath their feet sloped down, Maliq helped Abana to the bottom. “These tunnels were built during the Abyyabids’ reign. There is a mausoleum for dishonoured highborns at their nexus… that is where Rahab made his _true_ lair. A workshop of horrors.”

“What was that white shadow? Why did Master Rahab kill Qabus? Tell me!” 

Maliq frowned as he pulled Abana down the dusty corridor. “The less you know, the safer you will be!”

_‘No,’_ thought Abana. _‘Not this time!’_

The dancer stamped his sandaled feet and snatched his hand from the swordsman’s grasp. “Do not do that! Do _not_ sweep me aside! I want to know what is happening here! My friend is DEAD, and I want to know why! Tell me-”

A gloved hand clamped around Abana’s mouth. Maliq, armour clattering against his chest and shoulders, bade him “hush!” and “listen…” as a distant whistle echoed behind them. It took a moment for Abana to hear it too but when he did it was unmistakable. It drew closer and closer until a floating ball of light appeared at the top of the sloped pathway. An alert Maliq pulled Abana with him behind an abandoned slab nestled against a nook in the corridor’s walls and hunkered down with him as the that burning bright ball of light stalked them through the darkness.

The ignis fatuus stopped just a few paces from the slab where Maliq dropped the still burning torch. Abana’s eyes widened with panic as its white-gold flames churned within themselves and ‘blinked’ into an eye-like shape, ruby red and intensely focused, rotating around its own circumference before ‘blinking’ shut and floating away into another corridor.

Maliq exhaled.

“That was a seeker spell… Rahab knows someone saw the sacrifice.”

Abana tried to speak but uttered only a muffled groan with Maliq’s fingers still locked around his mouth. The Jafari man caught himself and let go. Abana did the same (not realizing he had wrapped his arms around the taller man’s back). They caught their breaths.

“Are we safe?” Asked the slave.

Maliq paused a moment then stood up. “…I believe we are now.” He gave a gauntleted hand to the Kushwari boy. “Come with me.”

Abana took Maliq’s hand and let him pull him up. The older man did not let go. Instead he took a firmer grip of Abana’s hand. “Stay as close to me as possible,” he said as he snatched the torch back up and ran with the dancer in the opposite direction of the ignis fatuus. This took them into another narrow stretch of tunnel ground untouched by human feet for hundreds of years.

“For years, my mistress suspected that Rahab of Mahmun was in league with dark forces and sent me to the Elephant Palace to seek the proof,” Maliq explained this as he ran with Abana. “The ignis fatuus you just saw and that white shadow from before? Both are conjurations of Kafnak.”

“Kafnak?” The breath flew into and out of Abana’s lungs as he struggled to keep up with Maliq’s quick pace.

“Whether god or demon or jinn no one really knows what it is, but Rahab has made its power his own and that makes _him_ one of the most dangerous men in the High East.”

Abana and Maliq stopped when they reached the end of a forked corridor. It was littered with rubble broken off from the ceiling by old earthquakes and centuries of unchecked decay.

“Which way?” Asked Abana.

As Maliq explained it the western pathway led back to the mausoleum in the central nexus whilst the eastern pathway led to an abandoned wine cellar in the heart of the city. The shorter corridor directly ahead of them had a gnarled rope ladder climbing up a tight shaft eighty cubits high that reached into an empty larder beneath the slave quarters of the Elephant Palace. Abana went for the rope ladder. Alarmed at this, Maliq quickly pulled him back.

“What are you doing?”

The Kushwari boy blinked. “We have to save my friends…! Hamami, Zanza, Pasha, Li and Roswyn? Oh, Roswyn. How do I tell her that her brother is dead…?”

Maliq frowned. “We _cannot_ go back. If we do, we will die here. Rahab knows someone saw his sacrificial ritual and he will scourge the Elephant Palace until he discovers who.” 

“Can we not at least warn them that-”

“We _cannot_. Think. Ishfan told me that Rahab can speak his thoughts into the minds of his slaves, is that not so?”

The slave brand on Abana’s nape itched. Having Rahab speak into his mind was one of the most unnerving things he had ever felt – like a cold needle sliding inside his ear.

Abana nodded.

“Then it is possible he can also _read_ your thoughts,” suggested Maliq. “Anything you say endangers them. Stopping Rahab is the only way to save the Silk Court… and my mistress might be the only one who can.”

They were his only real friends. They sang and danced with him, saw to his wounds, kept his mind from breaking beneath the weight of lecherous men and their horrendous vices. Leaving the Silk Court behind disgusted Abana – the idea was chalk in his throat. But Maliq’s point was sound. If the white shadow – Kafnak – truly was some sort of god then there was no telling what the upper limits of Rahab’s powers were.

But then how could Maliq’s mistress help?

“Who is your mistress?” asked Abana.

“Governess Yahya of Jawwaz,” said Maliq. “Come. Let me take you to her.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

When Kafnak’s magic encircled Abana of Hafiz he stood sombrely in the centre of the ancient mausoleum with his lover Maliq’s smouldering body at his sandals. And then all he saw was light. It was both blinding to the eyes and soothing to the skin, an eerie embrace, fierce and warm. His eyes tightly shut Abana felt the sensation of movement even as he stood still within the spell’s heart. The blurs of matter flickered beyond his eyelids as space sprinted in flow between his fingers and toes, rushing through his hair. It was a moment and an eternity. It was magic beyond human device and he was an errant leaf on its winds – until the magic stopped. The light dimmed and then his skin cooled.

_“Open your eyes,”_ said Kafnak.

Abana opened his eyes and saw familiar things. Bookcases overflowing with tomes. Wall mounted skulls. Animal foetuses floating in sallow jars of formaldehyde. Stone idols. Parchment. Ink and quills. Alembics. Abaci.

These were Rahab’s quarters.

Abana had only ever seen them once but he would never forget them. No soul on this earth could. The dancer’s heart thundered inside his chest.

“Where is Rahab?” Abana spat.

A grinning Kafnak floated in the air above him. His arms and legs were folded. _“Look behind you.”_

He turned around and saw a huge sheet of tarp enshrouding a tall figure. In a different context it might have looked like a marble statue post due for an unveiling. Abana tore the sheet away and found his old master and torturer, the Governor of Yaghazu – Rahab of Mahmun.

And by the gods he was pathetic.

His ivory mask was gone, and his face was unremarkable. There were no boils or buboes, no gnarled expressions twisted by burn scars or leprosy; just another common Tehraqi face with wrinkles and crow’s feet. His once wild black hair now lulled in knotted grey clumps. Although as tall as ever his cassock was gone and, in his nakedness, Abana saw the sunken frame that was hidden beneath it all along; haggard and gaunt. His tan skin was so tightly stretched against his bones that his ribs and veins bulged against it. His eyes were eyes – not a pair of black voids or eerie pools of ebon – just cloudy grey irises floating atop bloodshot sclera.

Ensorcelled rope bound up Rahab’s hands and feet. His mouth was muzzled by a knot of cheesecloth jammed between his teeth. Sweat dripped down his beating chest toward a small brown penis waddling around in a curtain of grey pubic hair.

_‘Just a man,’_ thought Abana. _‘Without the mask and the magic… just as wretched and human as the rest of us.’_

Abana almost pitied him.

_Almost_.

Kafnak produced another mouthless smile. _“And now… vengeance is yours to take, Dancer of Hafiz.”_

**********

(Early Winter, 1177)

Abana the Slave did not know when he fell asleep. He did not know how long he slept. All he knew was that when they first set out it was light and when he woke it was dark. The boy opened his eyes but did not lift his cheek from the warm spot upon Maliq’s back, and kept his arms tightly woven around the swordsman’s waist. It was his first time riding a camel and he daren’t let go – even in his sleep.

“Are you alright?” Asked Maliq. His hands kept a firm grip of the camel’s reins as it calmly strolled along the desert sands. His riveted helm and armour were gone, all abandoned in a Tehraqi back alley after they escaped the ancient tunnels beneath the Elephant Palace.

The escape was well-prepared and two years in the making. Maliq had a chest of provisions hidden beneath a loose flagstone at their escape point (the abandoned wine cellar) containing a commoner’s robes and cloak, a purse full of silverlings, a spare pair of sandals, a spool of rope, a concealable dagger and an empty waterskin. Once Maliq changed clothes (and gave the cloak to Abana to conceal himself and his distinctive slave brand) they climbed the sandy stone steps to a plywood door and emerged within the heart of Tehraq.

They disappeared into the throbbing crowds of its packed markets and busy thoroughfares. Ghassar and a small group of palace guardsmen took to the streets in pursuit of them, but Abana and Maliq hid themselves in a shadowed alley to outwait them.

Maliq had a contact on the other side of the city, a former camel herder and fellow acolyte of Lady Yahya’s by the name of Baelik, who supplied them with a healthy steed and a traveller’s pass out of the city. It was around noontide when they showed their documents to the _Wahdi_ guardsmen and set off on a camel hump into the distant east… now the moon was high, and the stars were shining down upon him in all sorts of beautiful colours. Maliq felt warm and strong in his arms. It was a quietly wonderous moment.

And then it finally hit him.

“I’m free…” Abana’s tears welled. “…I’m free…”

Maliq nodded. “We are not truly safe until we cross the border into Jawwaz, but I doubt that Rahab’s men will pursue us this far from the city. You can rest easy.”

Abana buried his teary smile in Maliq’s back.

“How long were you a… a captive?”

“…One year… four months… three weeks… and six days…” said the Kushwari boy. “My grandfather was Fouzan ibn Mushegh, the old Governor of Nyssinia… but I was born into poverty after his exile to Kushwar. We were left as goatherds… barely surviving from year to year… and then… when our entire herd died overnight… my father sold me to slavers. My own father…”

The boy smothered a sob.

Maliq said he need not continue if it was too painful to speak of the past. Abana kept on. “…The slavers took us from the Pushan Mountains all the way to the slave markets of Qazyr… and there I was purchased at market by Master Rahab.”

“That bastard is no longer your master. It is as you said… you are free.”

_Free_. Such a simple word. _Free_. As basic a necessity as air or water or food… but it took a slave to understand just how precious a resource it was. At the inception of his enslavement Abana fantasised plots of escape and even, semi-jokingly, told Hamami and the others of these plots. They always chided him for it. _“Do not trick yourself into hoping for things that will not manifest,”_ said Hamami. _“This is our life now. The sooner you adjust to it… the happier you will be.”_ In her own way she was not wrong. Thoughts of freedom were dangerous for slaves. They fostered a wilfulness that masters punished with abject cruelty, and they created hopes that tormented you the longer they went unrealized. Freedom was worth more than gold and silver combined.

“And you?” Abana wondered. “You must have a story to tell… a fate to share?”

Maliq swayed in the camel’s saddle. “Yes. I have a tale of sorts… but it is long and not untainted by slavery, I am ashamed to say.”

Abana held him close. “…Tell me.”

“I was born in _Jamaraland_ … the place you High Easterners call ‘Jafara’… and like my father, grandfather and great-grandfather before me I was raised as a Bloodshield… a sworn guardian of the Jamaran Royal Family. I came of age in tandem with my future queen, Hamra lo’a Daiira. I watched her charm and outwit cynical uncles and advisors… to my very marrow I felt she was destined for greatness. And then, on the day of her coronation upon the Jasmine Throne, she declared her first edict.”

“What was that?”

Abana watched Maliq smiled nostalgically. “In her own words… _‘the revocation of slavery as permissible by Jamaran custom and law_ … _the acquisition, trafficking, trade or sale of slaves is hereby forbidden… and all slaves within the queendom shall be manumitted within a negotiated allotment of time no longer than one year’_...”

“…She sounds like a kind queen.”

“She was,” said Maliq. “Slavery was as customary to Jamaraland as marriage… and the queendom had grown powerful by selling slaves to Tehraq. But Queen Hamra hated it with her very breath. She was born to a lesser ‘branch’ of the royal tree… one descended from slaves. When plague ravaged our lands and wiped out the main branch, she was left as the sole heir. She swore before the gods that she would purge all such injustices from her queendom… and she kept her promise. It was a bold action from a bold ruler… but it gave her powerful enemies. Enemies like the Prince of Tehraq.”

Abana (like every other High Eastern child raised upon tall tales of Tehraqi ‘bravery’ and ‘heroism’) knew how this part of the tale ended. (Then) Prince Qattullah assembles an army, builds a fleet, and sails it south to conquer Jafara. But still… Abana wanted to hear it from Maliq’s lips.

“Go on,” said the boy.

“Tehraq did not take kindly to this decree. King Gurkhan II sent his Grand Vizier and best diplomat, Governess Yahya of Jawwaz, to warn our queen against ‘recklessness’, but in the end, it was Lady Yahya who was swayed by Queen Hamra. They became friends... and kindred spirits in mutual disgust for a terrible evil. When the governess sent letters to the king explaining to him that Hamra lo’a Daiira would not be manipulated… he sent his son in reply.”

Abana felt Maliq tense.

“It was over the day Qattullah’s ships landed on our beaches,” whispered the swordsman. “No defences were prepared because Lady Yahya assured Queen Hamra that King Gurkhan could be won over without bloodshed. She was wrong. Qattullah besieged our coastal forts and burned our fishing villages. He captured our cities one by one. First Qal Qaffa, then Kananga, and then finally our capital and the seat of the Jasmine Throne – Gyasa. For six days and six nights Qattullah rained stone missiles and fire upon the city… bombarded the walls with catapults and ox bow arcuballistas… I begged Hamra to flee but she refused… I tried to protect her but no matter how many men I killed more came. An arrow stopped my sword… and then Hamra and I were captured.”

Abana did not notice it but Maliq had driven the camel up to a sandy ridge high above and beyond the sweeping dunes of the Great Desert.

“A merciful victor would have taken her captive and sent her to Tehraq. But _mercy_ is was never Qattullah’s way. He built a stage at the centre of the city and gathered all of the populace to watch as he beheaded my queen with his own sword…”

“…Maliq, I am so sorry…”

The older man lowered his head. “…I failed her. As her Bloodshield it was my duty to protect her… and she was slain by her enemies regardless. I failed. And like you, my reward was slavery… or at least it would have been if not for Lady Yahya.”

“She bought you?”

“And freed me, yes. When King Gurkhan recalled her to Tehraq she brought me with her. I resented her at first… I blamed her for misjudging her own people and dooming Jamaraland to subjugation… but eventually I realized that what happened to my country was forgone. And it is what will happen to every country beyond the High East so long as Rahab of Mahmun whispers in the ear of the Tehraqi Kings. So… I made _that_ my purpose. I made Yahya’s cause my own so that the tragedies of Jamaraland are never repeated… and that one day my homeland will be free of Tehraq’s grip for good and all.”

“You’ve suffered much,” said Abana.

“As have you,” replied Maliq. “Yet here we stand. Survivors. Look there.”

He pointed out to a sight beyond the ridge. Across the sweeping dunes to the distant east lay a succession of gigantic geological depressions spotting the panorama for tens of parasangs across. Whole impact craters littered with chunks of white sandstone, black glass and half-full of loose sand.

Abana was stunned. “W-what is that?”

“They say in ancient times the gods punished the hubristic Abyyabids by raining great boulders down upon them from the heavens. Those fissures are the proof of it… and they represent the border between Tehraq and the governorate of Jawwaz. Beyond them lies the oasis town of Iblyd… where Lady Yahya awaits.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

_‘What would this scene look like to an unknowing eye?’_ thought Abana of Hafiz. Him with his unsheathed dagger dipped in poison, standing over a naked and emaciated old man lashed by his wrists and ankles, whilst a genderless god borne of starlight hovered over them with macabre curiosity. Who looked like the aggressor? Who looked like the victim?

Would the spectator see the slave brand at the back of Abana’s neck? Would that spectator know the indignity of being purchased at market like a doe? Would they know of his torture and abuse? Would they know what it felt like to be tossed from man to man to man under threat of violence? Would they know what it felt like to watch helplessly as your persecutor sacrificed your friend to his cruel god like a slaughtered goat? Would ANY spectator understand the gravity of that old man’s crimes? No.

And it mattered not.

Abana grabbed a fistful of Rahab’s matted grey hair and watched the old sorcerer’s eyes tick frantically in their sockets with fear. _Fear_. Abana trembled too, not with fear but _anger_ ; a righteous and bloodthirsty anger suppressed for nearly three years that came _screaming_ out of him as he drove that poisoned kidney spike deep into the governor’s chest. Abana’s still face watched Rahab jerk up in pain and shock, eyes bulging, blood and bile soiling the cloth in his mouth. But it wasn’t enough. The Dancer of Hafiz ripped the dagger out of his former master’s chest and plunged it into his gut. He twisted the knife in Rahab’s belly, drawing out a baleful groan, then withdrew it again and stabbed his sternum.

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHH!”

Abana shrieked with fury as he stabbed Rahab again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again until intestinal matter slopped out of his bisected belly and blood streamed from his ribs and mouth and nose.

Rahab’s corpse slumped onto Abana’s shoulder. He shoved it off. The lumbering, bony and bloodied frame slumped lifelessly into a mangled heap.

Abana dropped the knife. He caught his breath. He spat Rahab’s blood out of his mouth but the salty iron taste remained. His face was splattered. His robes soaked.

An amused Kafnak sat next to him. _“Well then. Did the acquisition of vengeance live up to the fantasy? Has your sated fury finally brought you peace?”_

“What is owed… is owed,” Abana said it between breaths. “…and _peace_ … whatever that… might look like… that was only ever… a conceivable windfall…”

_“Do you know what I am?”_

“…No.”

_“Would you like to know?”_

“No.”

Kafnak smirked. _“…Liar.”_

Abana said nothing.

_“Humans are fond of lies. That is why truth is the language of the gods. Reality is what we speak.”_

Abana wiped the blood off his face. “More riddles.”

_“More lies.”_

“What do you want from me?” Abana said.

Kafnak turned to him. _“Humans are so interesting. You are so short-lived. So pathetic. So why is it… we gods are so obsessed with you? Why do we constantly interfere in the affairs of men? Why should I care one whit what a former slave does to his former master? Is that what you are thinking?”_

“Why did you let me kill him?” If there was one question Abana really had it was that. “Is this a trick? Was he another one of your illusions?”

_“That was no illusion,”_ said Kafnak. _“That old man you just butchered truly was Rahab of Mahmun. And I let you kill him because he was already dying. He was of little use. You see… I was born from the heart of a meteor that broke open upon the face of this desolate planet. And as I manifested into this world its people called me a god. And they worshipped me. They killed their own children in my name… hoping I might grant them a boon. And I accepted my role, as did my siblings… until we began to weaken…”_

Abana eyed the creature.

_“I did not understand at first,”_ said Kafnak. _“Not until Emperor Jaggarant II of the Abyyabids summoned me to his chambers. He was promised the hand of a beautiful Kushwari heiress, but she refused him… and do you know what he said? He said,_ “I care not if it costs me my empire, I will have the woman I love. Lend me your aid.” _The Emperor was my first host… and when I joined with him his passion for the Kushwari girl **rejuvenated** me. And it was then that I learned the truth of my own existence…”_

“…You feed on obsession,” said Abana.

_“Exactly!”_ said Kafnak. _“We gods feed upon human emotions and virtues. Love. Anger. Wisdom. Evil. Good. Justice. Mercy. Lust. Kindness. Cruelty. Sloth. Mine was obsession. And once we gods forge pacts with humans who embody our intrinsic hungers… our powers heighten tenfold. But as this knowledge began to spread the Abyyabids warred amongst themselves over our power… pitted us against each other like slaves in the arena… until the Last Emperor sealed us all away. I was imprisoned in a void for centuries… starved of sustenance and yet unable to die… until Rahab of Mahmun found the Tome of the Ancients… and summoned me to this plane of existence once more.”_

Abana concluded the rest on his own. A reckless sorcerer obsessed with his own research forging a pact with a god of obsession to acquire even more power. They deserved each other.

_“You humans me nothing to me,”_ said a leering Kafnak. _“I care not for you or your pain. I do not even care that my siblings are still imprisoned by human magic. All I seek is to **feast** … obsession dripping into my essence like wine… do you understand?”_

“I do,” Abana stood up. “And the answer is no.”

Kafnak smiled again. _“Think carefully, Dancer of Hafiz. The rage you felt when you dipped your dagger into Rahab’s heart… do you think that ends with him? Consider your friends in the Silk Court … when a new lord comes to take Rahab’s place, what becomes of them? Will you leave them to their shackles after all they did for you? No. Slavery has dulled your heart… but you still have one. I think you share the beliefs of Lady Yahya and Hamra lo’a Daiira. I think you know that killing a Rahab or a Dhabr or a Ganu is not enough to prevent others from falling into the clutches of like-minded men. I think you know the truth. To end slavery… the entire system must fall. **Tehraq must be destroyed**. And you know that I am the only one who can help you do it. So? What do you say? Will you join me and use my power to save your fellow slaves? Or will you refuse me and abandon them to their terrible fate?”_


	8. The Griffin and the Rose

(Early Winter, 1177)

Abana the (former) slave and Khamali Maliq Moromaya arrived in the oasis town of Iblyd some three days after their escape from the city of Tehraq. Upon their arrival at the city gates they were greeted by half a dozen children of various origins – Tehraqi, Kushwari, Jamaran, Xianese, Northlander, etc – each of them baring refreshment. Abana giggled as they gave him bread and a fresh waterskin of ice-cold water. How long had it been since he last seen a child with a happy smile?

“Come,” said Maliq as he dismounted the camel. It was exhausted from its journey across the desert sands. “Lady Yahya is waiting for us.”

As Abana was soon to learn, Iblyd was the largest oasis town in the High East. Its prehistorical foundations were built centuries before even the Abyyabid Empire took shape. The city and all its tenements and temples and marketplaces were constructed around acres upon acres of mangrove and date palm forests centred around a gigantic body of water that slaked the thirst of thousands.

The Sanguine Vigil, residence of Governess Yahya and her predecessors, was a large yet modestly designed lodge built from the ruins of an ancient clay and mud-brick fort. Its inner structures were rebuilt with limestone and refurbished with marble and lacquered wood decking to suit its lady’s needs. Its outer walls guarded acres of self-sufficient lands large enough to house and feed a staff of over 100 people.

When Maliq and Abana arrived at the lodge grounds they were received by two of the governess’ household staff and taken to her audience chamber in the Sanguine Vigil’s central cloister. They were given cups of wine to drink and bowls of dates to eat. Abana was not hungry but he was grateful. He drank the wine instead and marvelled at how… simplistic the audience chamber was. It was not like the Elephant Palace’s grand hall with its towering black walls, vaulted ceiling, and roaring pit fire. The ceiling was low and barely supported by its wooden beams. There were few decorations besides some old banners bearing the emblem of Lady Yahya’s household, the Griffin and the Rose. Her throne was a simple cushioned stool. Abana found it hard to believe that _this_ was the residence of governor.

And then she appeared.

The Governess of Jawwaz was a composed Tehraqi woman blessed with a warm smile yet cunning eyes. She showed some signs of age – streaks of grey in her braided black hair and crow’s feet fanning out of the corners of her almond-coloured eyes – but she retained a regal beauty befitting her station. The instant she saw Maliq, Lady Yahya up and embraced him. Abana felt something stir inside himself when he saw that but ignored it.

“I knew it,” she said softly. “I _knew_ you would return safely. It was just a matter of time.”

“My lady,” said Maliq. “You are a missed sight, but… I do not bring good news.”

“No, you’ve brought a guest,” that was when the governess first turned to Abana and embraced him. The boy froze, unsure of what to say.

“What is your name?” She asked.

“A-Abana…”

“Well Abana. It is good to meet you. Welcome to the Sanguine Vigil. Please make yourself comfortable as I fear we have much to discuss.”

There was an ewer of water and an empty cup upon the rug beside Yahya’s stool. As she took her seat the lady folded her silken black gown beneath her legs and poured herself a cup. Abana stared at her as if she had grown a third breast. He never once saw a noblewoman pour her own refreshment before – not once. “Your report, Maliq.”

He nodded. “…It is as we suspected. Rahab of Mahmun is empowered by the being known as Kafnak. He has amassed a cult of like-minded followers and performs annual human sacrifices to Kafnak with his own slaves. I witnessed this ritual myself, as did Abana, but we were forced to flee as a result.”

Lady Yahya looked to Abana. “Were you aware of these practices?”

“No, my lady. No. I… I was a goatherd in Kushwar before my father sold me to slavers. I was purchased by Mast- …by Rahab of Mahmun at the markets of Qazyr. He made me… entertain men with whom he sought to curry favour. I knew nothing of his… rituals and sacrifices… not until I saw him kill my friend Qabus. Maliq found me and he saved me. I owe him everything.”

“As does the entire High East,” Yahya demurred. “ _I_ underestimated the depths of Rahab’s arrogance. For him to play god with the monsters that doomed the mighty Abyyabids is unforgivable. Rahab of Mahmun must die.”

“Understood,” There was a resolute glint in Maliq’s eyes. “What is your plan? My sword is yours.”

“Stay your blade. I must consult with the other governors first.”

“The governors? My lady, with all due respect, these are the same men who conspired against _you_ when you objected to interference with Jamaraland. They were the ones who installed Rahab as Grand Vizier in your stead. How can we trust them?”

Lady Yahya smiled knowingly. “Even the humblest village idiot would know better than to trust those vipers. What I trust is their _self-interest_ … the governors tire of Qattullah’s constant warmongering and they know Rahab is fuelling it. They want Tehraq’s gains _consolidated_ rather than expanded upon. And wars are expensive. If I can convince them that killing Rahab will bring Qattullah to heel, they will listen.”

Maliq nodded. “Understood.”

“Enough skulduggery and politics. You two must be exhausted. Rest easy. I will have rooms prepared for our guest.”

Abana bowed his head. “My lady is too kind.”

“Not kind enough,” said Yahya. “The youth of your body does not match the age of your eyes, Abana. I cannot fathom what you have endured to this point but as a Tehraqi citizen who abhors these cruel practices I cannot apologize enough. No one should be another’s property. Know this. As a fugitive with no title deed I cannot legally buy and free you… but as an occupant of my domain you are a free man. I swear that upon my honour. You are _free_.”

It was like some cruel dream. Every second he spent in it, it was terrified he would wake up in his bed at the Elephant Palace and be returned to cruel reality. But _this_ was reality. He pinched himself. It was true. He was free. Abana’s eyes misted with tears as he threw himself at Lady Yahya’s feet and thanked her from the bottom of his heart.

“Free men do not kneel, Abana. Stand up.”

And so, he did.

“Once upon a time I made a friend,” Lady Yahya sat her hand upon Abana’s shoulder. “…Her name was Hamra lo’a Daiira. I did not speak her tongue and she did not speak mine, but she opened my eyes to an injustice that has surrounded me my entire life… and yet I was utterly blinded to it… to the inhumanity of it.”

“The others…” said the boy. “My friends in the Silk Court. Ishfan and the eunuchs… can you help them?”

Abana stood silently as the still seated Lady Yahya wiped away his tears with her henna-painted thumbs. For a moment she reminded him of his mother Paja.

“If it were in my power, I would tear down the very walls of the Elephant Palace to set them free… but not even I have that power. Slavery and warfare are the backbones of Tehraqi hegemony... ending them might mean ending Tehraq itself… who can say? All I can do is play my small part in these affairs and pray that history rights its course. For now? Rest. Eat. Drink. Freedom is a right that demands to be enjoyed.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

_“What is your answer?”_ Said Kafnak. _“Will you join me and use my powers to end the evil that was done to you once and for all? Or will you refuse me and turn your back on your poor brothers and sisters in chains?”_

Abana of Hafiz watched warm rivers of crimson ooze out of Rahab’s remains. As a slave… he hungered for his freedom. As a freeman… he hungered for vengeance. Now vengeance was his. Men who used and betrayed him (at least those that he could find) were now bloodstains in his wake. And did the poets not sing of the bittersweet emptiness of exacted vengeance? Yet that was not what Abana felt.

He felt relief. He felt joy. He felt pride. But most of all he felt longing, not for war, not for more blood, not for the overthrow of the Tehraqi regime… he longed for his beloved Maliq. All he could think of when all was said and down was his noble, beautiful face. All Abana wanted was to find him and ride with him to the furthest reaches of this god-forsaken world and live out the remainder of their lives in love, peace and freedom.

To hell with Tehraq.

“My answer…” began Abana, “…is no. I have spent my entire life playing the pawn – to my father, to my enslavers, to Rahab, to the men that bedded me, even to Lady Yahya. _No more_! I chart my _own_ course from here on out… a course free from the whims and wants of tyrants.”

_“…You mistake selfishness for virtue,”_ Kafnak smiled that mouthless smile again. _“Placing your happiness above the needs of others! A commendable egotism – were it not so heinous… ABANDONING the enslaved to their chains! HA!”_

Abana frowned. “I am no chain-breaker and it is not my responsibility to be one… that responsibility lies with the slave masters themselves. I can only play my small part… and hope that history corrects its _own_ course.”

Kafnak put its hand-shaped appendages together in mocking gesture resembling a clap. It made no sound.

“Mock me all you want. My answer is no.”

_“COWARD!”_

“Words,” said Abana. “Words. What have I to fear from words? Even if I did join you, destroy Tehraq and free all the slaves… once my _obsession_ is complete… what stops you from joining forces with the next petty hegemon _obsessed_ with restoring the old order? You do not offer freedom. You offer chaos on a game board with pieces of your choosing. And my answer… remains **_no_**.”

There were no lungs in that blinding golden-white mass that stood for Kafnak’s breast and yet it produced a roar like any beast from beyond the pit. The vibrations rippled out and shattered the alembics and the aludels and the latticework windows and the formaldehyde jars, it knocked the books from their cases and threw up a swirling torrent of parchments. Abana yelped as the force of the roar threw him backwards until his back slapped against the wall, but he did not fall. Kafnak’s magic kept him pinned against it like a crooked ornament.

_“No human has EVER refused me,”_ said Kafnak. _“I could tear the head from your shoulders like a wine cork! DO YOU WISH TO DIE?”_

Abana chuckled. “It does not matter… what you threaten me with. Rahab is dead and Maliq is safe… I have already won… **false god**.”

_“…Heh. Heh, heh. How disappointing,”_ said Kafnak, churlishly. _“I overestimated your morality, Dancer of Hafiz. But very well.”_

A chant escaped Kafnak’s lip-less face in a language Abana never heard before. The chant reverberated around the chambers like an echo in a cave and bounced from wall to wall amidst the whirlwind of broken glass, rustling papers, and swirling books. The Dancer of Hafiz could not understand what the false god was doing at first… not until he looked towards Rahab’s corpse. A bright golden glow surrounded it and grew brighter the longer Kafnak’s chant continued. That glow crackled with energy, bolts of it writhing up and down the cocoon of light… and then a cold terror filled Abana’s heart as he watched the blood puddles slowly shrink and flow backwards into gaping wounds that slowly re-sealed themselves until that mangled torso was whole again and the heart within it began to beat once more.

“…NO!”

Rahab’s ropes snapped. The books and papers and glass fell from the air like rain as Kafnak’s chant ebbed away into memory and the evil sorcerer of Yaghazu began to breathe again.

Kafnak lowered his ‘hand’.

Abana fell screaming from the wall into a puddle of overturned books as Rahab of Mahmun staggered back onto his feet.

_“Do as you please with the boy,”_ said Kafnak to the sorcerer as he turned his back to both and vanished into the air.

**********

(Late Spring, 1178)

The flower girls woke him up. As his eyes fluttered open six of Lady Yahya’s young attendants threw handfuls of lotus petals at him and scampered off out of his living. The Kushwari smiled, dusting them off his lap and out of his hair. There were worse ways to wake up – last time it was with a jug of cold water! Abana had only known freedom (once again) for three months then – waking up of his own volition was still so surreal to him.

The boy smiled as he crawled out of his feathered bamboo bed and padded over to his side table where fresh cloth and a basin of scented water awaited him. Abana washed the dust from his hair (which had grown long and unruly) and the crust from his eyes before changing into the fresh tunic and sandals the attendants left for him. The girls also left a basket full of refreshment for him – a warm oval of flatbread spread with curd and two chicken eggs, boiled and peppered. Abana did not stop to eat. He took the basket with him as he left his quarters at the central cloister for the stables. No one questioned him or his passage, not even the spearman guards. He asked Steedmaster Yuza for the use of a horse, but he could spare only a camel (which Abana was less confident in riding).

The boy decided to walk.

It was late morning when Abana left the Sanguine Vigil. He ate lightly of his bread as he followed the sloping highway into Iblyd. Ox-driven carts passed him by as local children played stick games in the bushes and around the termite mounds, kicking up clouds of dusty red as they ran and giggled together. Further in town the mood was vibrant – the markets bustled with custom for its apricots and dates, wines and beers, bread and meat, etc. A minor town guard kept order with regular patrols – these were not the corrupt _Wahdis_ of Tehraq but a homegrown force of dedicated fighting men – lightly armoured by their animal hide skirts and boiled leather gauntlets and greaves, which made them nimble and difficult to outrun. Abana saw them chunter intimidatingly through the streets in groups of three and four but they did little more than collar a few bread thieves and drunkards.

Iblyd was a peaceful place.

Maliq’s residence was on the other side of the city, built at the foot of a man-made stream (one of many) funnelling waters to the wheat fields beyond its walls. Abana found the swordsman cooling quietly in the shade of a palm tree, dressed only in loincloth, and with a sheaf of parchment in his hands. A soil-smeared iron pick sat abandoned by his feet.

“I did not know you could read,” said Abana.

Maliq smiled at his approach. “I am out of practice. There was not much call for it in the Elephant Palace.”

_‘Rahab stole two years from both of our lives…’_ thought Abana. He lifted his basket. “May I join you?”

The brown-skinned man patted the little patch of earth next to him. “How can I refuse when you bring food with you?”

The food was good but compared to the pig slop permitted to them in captivity it was _magnificent_. As Abana and Maliq ate together in the shade they also read through the parchment; a dense catalogue of newly conceived irrigation systems by the Tehraqi scholar Husma Baraqah. In eastern Jawwaz many of the crops had failed and Lady Yahya wanted her headmen to employ these approaches. She planned to propose them upon her next convocation of the council.

“Will this work?” Asked Abana.

“The diagrams are promising, but the instructions are… _confusing_. Why is Tehraqi so complicated a tongue? All these… q’s and y’s and k’s.”

“Is the Jafari tongue any better?”

“The _Jamaran_ tongue,” He corrected. “And yes, it is. _Shalla alha abeed_ – ‘ours is the richness’.”

“Beautiful. You must teach me some.”

Maliq smiled. “…If you can spare the time to learn. Does the governess not keep her people busy at the Sanguine Vigil?”

As a speaker of two languages and one of the few in Iblyd who could read and write, Lady Yahya was quick to employ Abana as her household scrivener. The previous notary died of pox just a short few days before his arrival at the Vigil, and she was in desperate need of one. And it was busy work. Lady Yahya corresponded with headmen, merchants, and traders (as well as her fellow governors) with daily regularity. It _was_ busy work. It was also boring work – but better that than dancing.

“It occupies my mind,” said Abana. He looked out across the stream to the date palm trees blanketing the reddened soils. “…Takes it away from other things.”

Maliq lowered his brow. “…Iblyd is peaceful.”

“It is. And my days are busy… but my nights are restless and plagued with nightmares. And I when I do not have nightmares, I dream of the friends I left behind. Hamami. Zanza. Li. Pasha. Roswyn. How can I call myself free when my friends are still in chains? And that _bastard_ Rahab of Mahmun walks free…”

“As does the king who slew my queen,” said Maliq. “Take it from me, Abana. Vengeance is a maw. It will consume you… unless you see something beyond it.”

Abana turned to him. “…What would I see?”

“ _A better life_. One where you can start afresh and pursue your happiness. We cannot mend the past, but we can-”

It was a sudden kiss… and a sweet one. Maliq did not expect it, but then neither did Abana. He merely saw that handsome and kind-hearted warrior and wondered what it might feel like to press those full brown lips against his own… finally. It was a burst of affection… and yes, it was wonderful.

Maliq pulled away… and smiled. “What was that?”

“That was me… pursuing my happiness.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

The flagstone floor was strewn with hay and rat droppings (and tiny puddles of sweat). It was unfamiliar to Abana of Hafiz – quite different from the Elephant Palace’s native black marble floors – there was no telling where he woke up. But as he tried to think through the blood rushing to his skull a crack of fire surged up his back and splattered blood across the ground. The welt ran from tailbone to slave brand. The Kushwari seethed through gritted teeth as a second joined it, then a third, and a fourth, until Rahab’s whip hand finally tired out. The lash fell limp as the sorcerer caught his breath. Abana opened his eyes and saw his blood ooze into the gaps between the flagstones as an enormous pair of feet slapped into his line of sight. Rahab took Abana by the chin and the chain suspending his shackled ankles from the ceiling chimed with shifted weight as he spun his torso towards his face.

“Look at me, damn you.”

Between the burning welts sliced into his back, the rush of blood to his head as he swung from the ceiling by his feet, and the encroaching fog of tears… Abana found it difficult to focus. But he did. Slowly. He glared his former master in the face – upside-down but defiant – and how humble that face now was. An unkempt white beard ate up his whole chin as wrinkles set into his brown skin like cracks in clay. His lips were dry and cracked, his black eyes cloudy with cataracts… and gone was his dark and terrible voice.

_‘Just a man,’_ Abana reminded himself. _‘Just a man…’_

“My men are out searching for that traitorous black pet of yours,” said Rahab. “It is only a matter of time before they find him. He will _not_ save you.”

Abana shut his eyes and smiled.

“Something amuses you, slave?”

The boy said nothing.

Rahab snatched Abana’s chin. “Ignorant child! I see through your petty defiance! You were a _fool_ to turn down Kafnak’s offer… and you _will_ regret it.”

“…That creature… is not a god. It is a… a parasite. And nothing… shy of _killing_ you… could be so sweet… as to watch you… the great Rahab of Mahmun… play host… to the seeds… or your own destruction…”

“…Freedom has made you wilful,” Rahab released his jaw with a shove. The sorcerer rose from his haunches and made his way to the cell door. “This time I will not wait for your wounds to heal. This time it will not be noble lords filling you with their seed… it will be my soldiers. You will be ravished and scourged one after another after another and after that? My horses and hounds will have their turn. A whore is a whore… and you will die like one.”

The cell door opened and slammed shut before the gaoler’s keys locked it up. Abana fought through the tears and the pain to permit himself a smile as thought of how awkward Rahab’s gait was as he walked away, how easily he was out of breath, how tired and weakened he looked. Kafnak had healed his stab wounds… but its magic had not purged Rahab’s lumbering frame of the bitterblack. Lady Yahya’s poison was a slow killer… but a certain one.

“Just a man,” Abana whispered. “…Just a man…”

**********

(Late Spring, 1178)

Maliq was as beautiful beneath the moonlight as he was beneath the sun. Glimmers of it caught the faint beads of sweat still clinging to his smooth umber brown skin and burnished the traces and outlines of his muscled torso. An equally naked Abana bit his lip and playfully traced one of his fingertips down those contours as the swordsman slept. He had scars (as any warrior of his pedigree would) as his was a body sculpted by war and violence.

When Abana invited Maliq back to his quarters in the Sanguine Vigil it was not with the _intention_ of dancing with him (though the thought had crossed his mind many a time heretofore) it was to properly thank him for all that he had done – freeing him from the Elephant Palace, bringing him to Iblyd. That morning Abana footed it to the markets for a jug of date wine and a basket of peaches. His intentions were plain. The Jamaran man came calling soon after Abana had finished his notary duties for the day. They embraced as soon as they returned to his rooms (with a closeness that lasted a bit too long for mere friendship) and it all came pouring out of his chest; how much he cared for Maliq, how much he valued his company and protection, how he would never be able to repay the debt owed to him but would spend every day trying. Maliq smiled that warm smile of his and asked if they could enjoy the wine together – and Abana was happy to oblige.

And so, they sat, and they talked about everything. They spoke of their respective homelands and their cultures and traditions. They spoke of Tehraq (both its evil and its greatness) and wondered if reform was possible if Lady Yahya, or someone like her, ever took power from King Qattullah. And they spoke warmly of each other. Perhaps the wine had gotten to his head but Abana could not help but blurt out all the things he saw in Maliq that he liked – his kindness, his bravery, his nobility, his sense of duty – and it was no lie to say that Abana had never met anyone quite like him before. In breath and flesh Khamali Maliq Moromaya was the virtuous paragon he imagined his grandfather Fouzan ibn Mushegh to be, the paragon Abana never saw in his own life. His was a life filled with evil men too fond of rape and slavery and slaughter.

And for Maliq?

He explained how he found himself stunned, absolutely stunned, at how resilient Abana was. He had never known anyone to endure so much and live on regardless. He compared it to himself and how empty he felt after his queen’s execution. He dedicated himself root and stem to Lady Yahya’s cause not merely because it was worthy but because his whole life had been fashioned around the idea of _purpose_. He was a Bloodshield and a Bloodshield’s purpose was to protect his queen. Without his queen, he had no purpose… and without purpose… his whole life felt meaningless.

_‘But compared to what you’ve been through,’_ said Maliq, _‘my troubles were miniscule.’_

They talked until the sun fell and the moon rose. They talked until the wine jug was empty and the basket was full of soggy peach stones. Abana was on his back, gazing up at the wooden rafters as he spoke to Maliq of the Legend of Mut, the moon goddess of Kushwar and the empress of the tides. It escaped him how the conversation veered into such a direction, but it was one of his mother’s favourite folktales and he wanted to share it. But as soon as he tried to get a word out, Maliq’s deep brown lips closed against his own.

Throughout the formative year of Abana’s life human passion was a grotesquery, carnal and carnivorous, eating away at his flesh and sanity without a shred of care for his wants and his needs and his desires. Not until Maliq kissed him beneath the moon that night did he understand what it felt to dance with a man by his own volition. Not until that kiss did he feel true desire burning inside himself, scratching, and gnashing to be acknowledged.

It could have been the wine.

It could have been the man.

Perhaps it was both.

But he felt it then beneath Mut’s moon, frank and stark, the throes of desire. Abana leaned into Maliq’s kiss with a lusty whimper as the Jamaran tore the clothes from his body, piece by piece, and they danced together for the first of many nights to come.

*

The moon was at its peak now.

Abana gently kissed Maliq’s forehead and carefully untangled himself from the older man’s embrace. He re-tied his loincloth and stretched his limbs before padding out through the paper screen door to the peristyle outside. The colonnades were built around a large and well-tended garden of jasmine flowers that gave the air around it a relaxing scent. This was but one of the four peristyles that made up the central complex of the Sanguine Vigil and it was allocated to key household staff – the stablemaster, the steward, and the like. In some ways it reminded him of the Silk Court’s chambers – without the lavish decorations and reflecting pool.

He wondered how the others were doing. Did they know that Qabus was dead? Was Rahab of Mahmun punishing them for his abscondence? Would Hamami be jealous that Abana beat her to Maliq’s heart?

_‘Will I ever see them again?’_ Thought Abana.

“Can you not sleep?”

The voice came from the boy’s left as he leaned over the wooden balustrade overlooking the jasmine flowers. It was Lady Yahya, dressed in a thin samite nightgown dyed black and trimmed with silver. A while veil obscured her features. The older woman strode up to Abana and stood with him to admire the garden.

“I have not slept,” said Abana.

“I see. I… heard a rumour that you invited Maliq to your chambers today. Is this true?”

Abana blushed.

“Do not misunderstand. My staff are free to wed or take lovers as they please but _only_ with reference to me. There are suitors who have requested my permission to pursue him since his return.” 

That did not surprise Abana. It baffled him why someone had not sought his heart _before_ the mission at the Elephant Palace. “Apologies, my lady. I did not know. It was not planned…”

The governess smiled. “…Well? How was it?”

Abana smiled back. “…It was wonderful. Like a glut of water in the desert.”

“And yet… how restless you look.”

It was troubling that his emotions wore so plainly upon his features… or perhaps the governess was just that perceptive. Either way, she was right. Things with Maliq were perfect. His troubles had a different source.

Anger.

“I’ve been having… nightmares. Every night I see that ivory mask staring back at me… _taunting_ me. I think of my friends still under his thrall. The idea that that _demon_ of a man is still out there…! I thought I would be afraid of him my whole life but now that I am free… I just hate him. I HATE him. And I cannot stop thinking about how _much_ I hate him.”

Lady Yahya folded her arms. “I understand your feelings. When Qattullah stole Hamra from Maliq and I… I felt that same rage. But in my experience, nothing good ever comes from it. You must rebuild your life, Abana and to do that you must look forward, not back.”

“…Maliq said the same.”

“He has favoured you for some time,” said Yahya. “I see it in his eyes. The way he looks at you when you look away. The way he speaks of you. A future can be found in those emotions… a happy one.”

“How can I make him happy with all this anger and hate inside me?”

Lady Yahya smiled flatly. “Speak plainly, Abana. Tell me what you want.”

“…I want to help you **kill** Rahab.”

The governess took a deep breath and shut her eyes. It was as if she was weighing the wisdom of her reply. “…In Tehraq there are two kinds of politics – one of the _eyes_ , and one of the **shadows**. I cannot oppose the grand vizier openly because it would threaten my position. But… through the back channels of correspondence you helped to re-open, the other governors have communicated to me that they want Rahab gone also.”

“You have their backing?”

“They say that King Qattullah plans on annexing Kushwar upon his return to the High East. He wants to use the additional resources to fund a military expedition into Yahvat Yahva, the lost capital of the Abyyabids, where more creatures like Kafnak are sealed and buried. This is all Rahab’s doing and the governors know it. They want him dead before the king returns to Tehraq.”

She rested a palm on Abana’s shoulder.

“Abana. If you genuinely want to do this… you risk the peace you have found here in Iblyd. You may not even survive. Are you _absolutely_ _sure_ this is what you want to do?”

“I will have no peace… until Rahab of Mahmun is dead.” Abana said. “Let me help you.”

Lady Yahya nodded. “…So be it. Tomorrow… we begin.”


	9. Burn the Mask

(Mid-Winter, 1179)

The governess asked them, Abana and Maliq, if they were ready to depart.

Both nodded yes.

After months in the making, preparations were complete. Abana of Hafiz opened the folds of his hooded sable cloak and unsheathed the kidney spike by an inch, just enough to display the freshly forged blade within – polished and poisoned. Lady Yahya nodded approvingly. Bitterblack poison was almost odourless, only seasoned herbalists had the nose for it. Whomsoever survived the wound would not survive its kiss. And then a stolid Maliq stepped forward and drew his scimitar. Much like Abana’s dagger it was fashioned from watered steel and designed for swift death. It was called _Lion’s Claw_ and it was a gift of Yahya’s own commission.

They were ready.

It was no easy road getting there. When Maliq woke from that first night of passion, Abana was forced to tell him the truth – that he had declared himself for Lady Yahya’s campaign against Rahab of Mahmun and was determined to be the executioner – one way or another.

Maliq, who had already sacrificed two years of his life to that campaign, was not pleased with the news. The Kushwari boy did not blame him for that at all. The rural life of Iblyd was hard but peaceful and it suited him well. All he wanted was to put the past to rest and settle down to a comfortable life. Abana wanted those things too (as he explained) but he also knew that he would never be content with that life until he _ended_ Rahab’s.

But not just Rahab’s.

There were others out there who hurt and betrayed Abana – were they owed any less of a debt? The dancer made it plain. The path to happiness could not precede the cause of vengeance. _“I want you,”_ Abana had said to Maliq that night, _“but I cannot build a life with you until Rahab and his ilk have been made to pay… I cannot rest until they do.”_

He was disappointed. He was saddened. He was most certainly angry. But he understood. And eventually he kissed Abana beneath the moonlight to assure him of the fact. _“If your heart is set on vengeance then you must take it,”_ said the Jamaran. _“But you must take me with you.”_

They made love again after that.

From that point on Abana devoted himself to his training. His mistress was an herbalist by nature and knew much of the arts of healing and poisoning, as well as the histories and courtly affairs of Tehraq. Abana absorbed everything she had to teach. By day he was the _notary_ , drawing up important missives and carefully maintaining the Sanguine Vigil’s records. By night he was the **assassin** , practicing the arts of poison and seduction and perfecting his dance until Hamami herself would have been jealous.

As he honed himself sharp as a knife for the grim tasks to come, Abana found support as well as solace in Maliq’s arms. They grew closer to each other as the months passed by until Abana requested permission for Maliq to move into his quarters at the Sanguine Vigil, a request that Lady Yahya granted. Whether to eat or talk or sleep or dance, Abana and Maliq spent every spare moment with each other until love slowly overwhelmed them. It was not planned. Neither of them predicted it. Abana just caught himself staring at his lover one night and it struck him like an arrow… that he _loved_ this man. He _needed_ him. He would go to the ends of the earth for him.

Two opponents warred for dominance within Abana’s soul – his budding love for Maliq and his bitter hatred of his abusers.

One was light and one was dark.

One was the future and one was the past.

And then one night, a hundred moons ago, Maliq admitted to Abana a similar pain – that for years his sole obsession was to see strip Tehraq to its very foundations, free Jamara from its grasp, and to toast that freedom by delivering Qattullah’s severed head to the gravesite of Hamra lo’a Daiira.

‘ _Seductive yet unobtainable’_ was how he described it. ‘ _The worst kind of dream.’_

Abana asked him how he overcame it.

_“I met you,”_ he had said.

Abana disliked himself because he knew himself too well. He was not as strong as Maliq. His hatred would not be quelled by love. Only blood would sate his rage… but paradoxically, he knew that only by sating his rage could he put it behind him and have the life he deserved with the man he loved.

Thus, when he and Maliq went before Lady Yahya that day, once all the preparations had been made, he felt no sense of sadness or nascent trepidation… just a burning desire to bring it all to a close.

The governess of Jawwaz sat upon the cushioned stool of her audience chambers with an unsealed roll of parchment in her lap. “I have just received word that the annexation of Kushwar is complete. The army garrisons at Qasr Ghazna to await Qattullah’s orders. As soon as the king returns to Tehraq for his victory banquet, he will declare his expedition to Yahvat Yahva. You must kill Rahab before that happens.”

“How long before Qattullah returns to Tehraq?”

“Twenty days,” said Yahya to Abana. “You have a head start but do not become complacent. Once you leave Iblyd you must make your way to Qazyr to convene with the merchant Dhabr. He is delivering prize animals to Tehraq as gifts for the king – use his caravan as cover to sneak yourselves inside the city, where you must journey to the Old Plague Ward and convene with Magistrate Tayyab, a representative of the governors. He will get you into the Elephant Palace.”

“What is his plan?” Asked Abana.

“These are plots of treason we are hatching, Abana. The less we put to parchment the better. You will know when you get there.”

The dancer nodded.

“Remember – you are to _kill_ Rahab, not fight him. He is a dangerous man with or without Kafnak. Dose him with the bitterblack as he sleeps. The poison will claim its victim within three days which should be enough time for you to escape. If you are caught, you will be tortured and killed. The governors and I will deny any involvement with you. Do you understand?”

Abana nodded _yes_.

Then Lady Yahya looked to the Jamaran man by his side. “You are rather quiet, Maliq. Have you nothing to say?”

The swordsman shut his eyes. “No. We complete this task and return to you at the earliest opportunity. I swear it.” Maliq stood up and bowed to the governess. His riveted helm and armour rattled beneath his sable cloak as he left the chamber in silence.

Yahya demurred. “He is angry with me.”

“With me also,” said Abana. “But he understands.”

Judging by her expression the governess did not agree. Regardless, she extended her hands to the Kushwari boy and asked her to take them.

He did.

“Abana. You are about to embark upon a mission that might re-shape the course of history. I know you have your own reasons for doing this… but never lose sight of that.”

“I shall not,” Abana kissed Lady Yahya’s hands goodbye. “And we shall not fail you. We shall return.”

*

Abana found Maliq outside the gates of the Sanguine Vigil adjusting his horse’s saddle and attaching _Lion’s Claw_ to its harness. Steedmaster Yuza gave them a pair of dun-coloured mares; well-trained, sturdy, and inured to desert conditions. Their saddlebags bulged with provisions and waterskins.

“Maliq.”

His hands stilled. “I do not like hiding things from her, Abana. She is a Tehraqi to her core, but I owe her my freedom.”

“As do I,” It almost hurt to think that Maliq did not think he felt the same. Abana bade the taller man face him. As soon as he did, he threw himself into Maliq’s armoured embrace. “Are you still with me? I cannot do this without you, Maliq…”

The swordsman man lifted the dancer’s chin and held his gaze until he saw (and understood) the conviction in his eyes. “Beloved, hear me plain. Whether heaven or hell… wherever you go, _we_ go.”

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

_‘Beloved, hear me plain,’_ he’d once said. _‘Whether heaven or hell… wherever you go, we go.’_

Khamali Maliq Moromaya had the heart of a poet beating inside his chest. _Maliq_. As the blood soiling his back began to cool and the stench of his own dried urine toxified his senses ( _Maliq_ ) Abana of Hafiz left his mind to wander of those lost days in Iblyd, running from his parchment and quill at the Sanguine Vigil to that tiny little homestead at the edge of the mangrove forest ( _Maliq, I’m sorry…_ ) where all the happiness in the world awaited him.

_(…You were right, all along…)_

Why was not it enough?

Those warring tribes of his heart, light and dark, had he merely… given in to one? The wrong one? Why was it _now_ , in the frank pit of reality, that his mind gave him pause to re-consider? Was it the pain, the physical pain? No. He suffered worse as a slave… far worse. Then what was the source of the regret? Why now?

_(…I never intended to live…)_

A black sea filled his soul. An emptiness. And then a spark, a spark that blossomed into a raging fire, sprung up from those waters heedless of all improbabilities. The great inferno swelled the sea until its lashing tongues spread to all corners of its reach, warring with the depths below but never conquering them… but why? Why? Why was it not better to just… ebb away with the tide and be forgotten?

_(…I did not deserve you…)_

“…I… I… was a fool…”

_(…You should have left me to rot here…)_

“…Oh Maliq…”

_(…I pray you build your happiness someday…)_

*

He smelt the smoke first. Even in his state it slowly kindled his consciousness from the miasma of blood. Next came the heat. It was worse than the oppressive bludgeon they called the Tehraqi sun – it was a heat that prickled the skin like a naked flame against a cold traveller’s fingertips. It was the sort of heat that burned until it consumed all in its way.

There was a fire out there.

_‘This is it,’_ thought Abana. _‘This is how I go…’_

The cell door was built of a sturdy ironwood that had not rotted throughout the centuries. Only a key or fire could get through it, so it did not surprise him when he heard the door unlock. Had Rahab made good on his threat and sent his men and horses and hounds to rape him to death? No. Not with a fire raging. Perhaps he was back with that soiled whip of his get a few last sadistic lashes in before the fires came to burn the flesh from his bones.

No.

Not that.

In the end it was him… that man that the _true_ gods made for him to love and cherish… the man he almost lost.

“M-Maliq…?”

The Jamaran man, clad in pilfered guardsman’s armour, warned him not to speak to keep his strength up. He put Abana’s arms around him and told the dancer to hold on tight as he unlocked the manacles around his ankles. He clung on desperately as his feet gave way, and slowly the fogging rush of blood passed. Once he was right side up, he slumped into Maliq’s arms, too weak to stand on his own feet.

“Are you alright?” Maliq yelled. “Abana, speak to me! Are you alright?”

_‘…I knew you would come…’_ “…Yes, my love… I am alright… I will survive…” _‘You should not have… you should have left me… but I knew that you would…’_

Maliq took a moment to inspect the wounds along Abana’s back. The welts had congealed so they did not weep freely, but they risked infection the longer they went untreated. _‘Why do you love me like this?’_ The Kushwari boy was like a lifeless doll in the Jamaran’s grasp as he took off his tattered doublet and undershirt, tore the shirt into strips with which to bind up and dress Abana’s wounds, then slipped the doublet back onto his torso to lift him up to his feet. _‘How can you not see how worthless I am?’_

Maliq took Abana’s left arm and draped it over his two shoulders. “Lean all your weight on me. Just put your feet forward and I will do the rest.”

Merely thinking was a struggle at that point, but somehow Abana heard the command and somehow, he managed to put a foot forward. He put down a second then a third and slowly he hobbled his way out of the gaol in Maliq’s arms.

The Elephant Palace gaol was converted from vacant cellars beneath the blacksmith’s forge. It boasted twenty cells (all empty now) along a u-shaped corridor 100 paces long on each stretch. Dead guardsmen littered its flagstones.

At the end of that corridor was a tall flight of stone steps that Maliq helped Abana climb. They led up to the palace grounds where the smoke rolled across the black marble floors and the thrashing of the flames roared in their ears. Embers wafted on the air. Distant load-bearing pillars crumbled within the raging flames and brought their ceilings down with them, crashing into thick black clouds of dust and ash. Abana heard screams over the chaos as well. Guardsmen, led by Ghassan perhaps, were yelling for his men to “hold their nerve” and fetch buckets of water from the wells to douse the flames. Some screams were those of the dying. Others were of escaped slaves and eunuchs breaking free from their confinement and absconding.

Abana’s thoughts went to the Silk Court as Maliq hurried him down the corridor and away from the worst of the chaos. _‘Hamami… Pasha… Li… Zanza… Roswyn… wherever you are… take your chance… escape…!’_

The rolling smoke was so thick it singed his bare shins as he strode through it. Maliq warned him to keep his head up and not inhale as they turned a corner to avoid a hallway shrouded in fallen timber. The long path ahead ended in a crush of rubble, broken cabinets, and statues, but beyond that was an exposed crevasse… one of the Elephant Palace’s many clandestine pathways. From there it was the only way out.

Maliq went first, carefully climbing the mound then (once he found a solid footing) reached out his arm to his lover. Abana, still cripplingly weak, took Maliq’s hand and held on as the older man dragged him up to the top of the pile with a single arm. From there they slid over to the other side and fled into the hidden corridor.

“We must keep going,” said Maliq. “One of Yahya’s men, Baelik – he awaits us outside the palace. Come.”

It was narrow and pitch black. The further they ventured down its sloped path the thinner the smoke. The roars and tremors of the palace collapsing upon itself grew distant. Abana found it easier to breathe. They pressed on until the pathway returned them to the dank bowels of the Abyyabid mausoleum buried beneath the palace grounds. All its sconces were lit. Death masks and burial urns sat untouched upon stone shelves. Dust covered the floor like snow.

Then, as Maliq and Abana verged out into a huge dome-shaped chamber with its walls sculpted into ignoble frescos, they found a tall and solitary figure standing in the centre with a broad-bladed scimitar. He was gaunt and he was weak, struggling for his every breath, but he still had white hot magical energy burning around his free hand.

He was Rahab of Mahmun.

“As a babe I was abandoned in the desert…” he whispered to himself. “Cast out by parents I did not know for a deformity I did not choose… but then the desert monk found me. He taught me of the gods… of alchemy and magic… but he was too afraid to seek the deeper truths… too scared to seek the _source_. And so, I surpassed him. And I rose from a lowly scrivener to the Grand Vizier of Tehraq… all to return to Yahvat Yahva, the seat of the Abyyabids… to revive our ancient past and reclaim the lost knowledge… the power of the gods…”

Rahab raised his sword up and shuffled around on his bony feet to greet his guests. “Why are your minds so small? Why are your souls so primitive? So uninquisitive? How can you not wonder… of the realities of reality? If you are content… to roll _ignorantly_ the filth of this tiny little planet then so be it. My future… is in THE STARS ABOVE US! AND I WILL DESTROY **ANYONE** AND **ANYTHING** THAT STANDS IN MY WAY! **EVEN THE GODS THEMSELVES**!”

“Stand down!” Maliq grabbed Jahanshah’s hilt as a warning. “Howsoever you still live, your ‘god’ and your men have abandoned you! Your palace is crumbling around your ears! It is over!”

“Not while I still BREATHE!”

Abana smiled darkly. “You will not be breathing for long. Bitterblack poison is crawling through your veins …you will be dead before dawn. You will NEVER see Yahvat Yahva. You will die in this pit… just like Qabus… just as you deserve!”

Rahab sneered. “SILENCE, you ignorant-” and then the sorcerer suddenly stopped. He threw a hand around his mouth to stop a sudden glut bubbling through his throat and surging up to his lips. Blood and bile leaked through the gaps between his fingers.

“Damn you…” Rahab shook with rage as his raised up his sword. “DAMN YOU!”

Maliq pushed the weakened Abana aside, warning him to stand back as the mad sorcerer brought his burning hand to his backsword’s blade and set it alight. His spell was swift, but it was not done… for as he swung his sword behind his back, he muttered an incantation in the ancient tongue as he thrust his flaming palm into the ground. The dust rippled from the impact like waves in the water as six sparkling streaks of white fire shot free from his hand and snaked off in six directions towards six slab caskets lodged into the walls. The caskets all flashed with the diffusion of magical energies and fell still. Then, as the destruction of the Elephant Palace roared on above their heads, those six caskets broke open into clouds of sepulchral dust, and the half-preserved ancient corpses interred within slowly rattled into un-life.

“By the blood of the Sun God…” Maliq raised his sword and kept Abana close behind him as six lumbering, skeletal cadavers crawled out of their caskets and ambled towards the pair like ravenous red-eyed dogs.

Rahab of Mahmun, sword and fist aflame, steered them to their quarry. “KILL THEM BOTH!”

* * *

(Mid-Winter, 1179)

Abana of Hafiz and Khamali Maliq Moromaya came upon the Ziggurat of Mnenomon on their third day of flight from the oasis town of Iblyd and a day after crossing the impact crater boundary between the dominions of Jawwaz and Tehraq.

As they found the ziggurat it was merely partway through its construction, encircled by ironwood scaffolds over 200 cubits high. By Abana’s guess they had nearly a thousand slaves constructing it: broad-shouldered men of largely Jamaran origin dressed in nothing but sweat and loincloths. A rotating series of carts and sledges (driven by oxen and mules) delivered massive sun-baked stones to base of the edifice where the slaves used ramps, pulleys, and rope riggings to ferry them up to the summit.

It was a churning hive of activity enforced by a joint contingent of _Wahdi_ spearmen (on loan to the temple from the Royal Court) and paid Tehraqi slave tamers. Any slave who did not pull fast enough or chisel hard enough was beaten or whipped. Architects and stone masons gave directions to the slave tamers, many of whom were versed in the Jamaran tongue, who then passed those directions onto the slaves.

The Ziggurat of Mnenomon built up slowly at the base of a small and rocky valley just a few hundred paces off the main caravan lanes. Abana and Maliq entered the site by blending into the traffic of bawling cattle dragging heavy mud brick cargoes inbound, shielding their faces from the clouds of red dust and sand kicked up into the air like mist. There was a large encampment just a hundred paces east of the main site – hundreds of tents surrounded by trenches, waste pits, latrines, tanning racks, cookfires, workbenches and makeshift kilns bulwarked by a ringed wall of wooden stakes driven into the earth. Each thatched roof entrance (one for every compass point) was guarded by a small dispatch of six or seven _Wahdis_. Abana and Maliq pulled away from the cattle traffic ambling noisily towards the ziggurat and approached the eastern gate.

“Greetings!” Said Abana. “Glory to Mnenomon and his highness the King! I am Shahar Yajna, a novitiate of the Temple of Mnenomon in Jawwaz. Who is in charge here?”

_Wahdi_ captains symbolized their station by bearing three peacock plumes from their helms rather than one.

“I am.” The captain arose from his stool. He was grey-bearded and battle-scarred. “State your business.”

“At the behest of Governess Yahya, I bring offerings of sage and frankincense to bless the creation of this great structure! And, for your master, I bring the finest date wine fresh from the oasis town of Iblyd! Would you be so kind as to deliver this wine whilst we bring the offerings to your head priest?”

The _Wahdi_ captain frowned. “We have work to do, novitiate. Deliver _your_ _own_ gifts. Take the wine to the red tent but leave your slave here.”

Maliq frowned but held his tongue.

Abana thanks the captain for his time and coaxed his horse past the guards into their camp, cantering by its busy cooks, blacksmiths and cupbearers. The headman’s tent was nestled at the centre of the encampment, guarded by two more _Wahdi_ spearmen. Abana dismounted and asked one of them to summon the camp commander, which they did (grudgingly) and out he emerged. 

Hakkan the Slaver.

Abana grit his teeth with spite. Fifty moons ago he uncovered a missive sent to Lady Yahya from the Temple of Mnenomon. It requested a ‘small’ donation of 600 silverlings to aid the construction of the ziggurat and in passing it mentioned that the grand overseer had commissioned a famed slave trader named Hakkan to supervise the slave staff. 

And it _was_ him. Abana recognized that bald head from half a parasang away, though these past two and some years had not been kind to him. Much of his muscle was lost and replaced with fat (distorting the shape of his tattoos) and his right arm was missing from the elbow down. In its place was a boiled leather prosthesis with a bloodstained bullwhip attached to the ‘wrist’. He was no longer the man he was… but he was still fearsome. Hakkan still had it in him to break any slave’s spirit.

“Master Slave Tamer!” Greeted Abana, cheerfully. “A thousand blessings unto you for your aid in building this divine monument!”

Hakkan dug a finger into his ear and flicked out the wax. “Another preening pilgrim…? Spare me your damned sermons. What is it you want?”

“The Temple of Mnenomon in Jawwaz offers you a gift, good sir.” Abana fetched the date wine and a small ceramic cup from his saddlebags. The cup was coated with bitterblack. He poured a sample of the wine into the cup and handed it to Hakkan. “Please, good sir! Avail yourself! You have _earned_ it.”

Hakkan snatched the cup out of his Abana’s hand and sniffed it suspiciously… then handed it to one of the Wahdis. Fortunately, he was less sceptical than the slaver and swallowed it whole.

“It is good!”

Hakkan snatched the cup back, then tossed it to Abana and ordered him to pour another drink (which he was happy to do) and the bald pate took himself a swig.

“Not bad,” he said. “I’ll take the rest.”

There were three more bottles of date wine inside his saddlebags. Abana asked the Wahdis to take them into Hakkan’s tent, gave the opened bottle to Hakkan himself, then offered profuse blessings and thanks as he took his horse’s reins and excused himself to ‘confer with the high priest’. He turned to leave.

“…Wait,” said Hakkan.

Abana froze.

“…Turn around…”

Abana turned around and found Hakkan towering over him, blotting out the sun with his thick shoulders. He was not the man he was… but he was still fearsome. And he cracked his bullwhip.

“You look familiar…” he said. “…Why do I feel I’ve seen you before somewhere…? What is your name…?” 

“Me? I am Shahar Yajna, sir… a novitiate of the Temple of Mnenomon in Jawwaz. Perhaps you attended a feast day at our shrine?”

“Jawwaz, you say?” Hakkan’s eyes thinned. “I’ve never even been to-”

He was cut off by a resounding crash so loud and destructive it sent a flurry of dust throughout the camp. All eyes turned to the Ziggurat of Mnenomon as one of the ropes connected to a pulley snapped and its gigantic stone fell crashed into the base of the structure. The shockwave knocked the slaves screaming from their feet and shot up a plume of dust and rubble that rocked the scaffolds from their walls. Slaves and slave tamers alike ran for their lives as one by one they toppled over and crushed to death anyone unlucky enough to be caught in their shadows. A nearby Wahdi dropped his spear and sounded the alarm bell as dust clouds swallowed up the camp.

“Damn!” Yelled Hakkan. “Secure the livestock!”

With a man like him there was no telling if he meant the oxen or the slaves. As Hakkan’s slave tamers and the _Wahdis_ scrambled to contain the chaos, a hooded Abana returned to his horse discreetly slipped away. 

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

Abana of Hafiz knew fear.

Fear of the future. Fear of lust. Fear of violence. Fear of wrath. But this was a fear he could not comprehend. He only _felt_ it – choking and intrusive like a stone in his chafed throat, foreboding like the distant crackle of thunderheads on an open plain. This was a primal fear from a forgotten time predating the creation of the wheel and the conquest of fire. Abana felt it from the pit of his stomach to the marrow of his spine as he watched those creatures crawl out of their own caskets to kill him and the man he loved. For all the horrors this miserable life had shown and rendered unto him… none compared to absolute horror of this necromancy.

_Ghouls_.

Beneath the ancient finery time had ravaged into tattered rags, their marbled skins yet clung to their bones like the sloughing flesh of a leper. They moved in shuffles and jerks and twitches like puppets dancing on strings, eyes flaming blood in the dark before they came screaming for him.

But Maliq’s battle roar shattered through their screeching din. The first of Rahab’s ghouls pounced off the ground and threw itself at the swordsman just as Jahanshah slipped free of its sheath and sailed through its spinal bones. The ghoul split into two halves and shattered against the floor into a puddle of itself, its fractured arms, legs and skull wriggling and twitching in the dust until they fell still again. By that time two more ghouls were upon the Jamaran, one scuttling across the floor to gnash at his feet with its teeth as the second ran at Maliq from his left. Growling, Maliq stomped his sandaled foot through the crawling ghoul’s skull and stomped it into an ashen pulp, but even _headless_ , the magics empowering that ghoul remained strong enough for it to snatch its arms around Maliq’s leg and hold him fast. The other ghoul hurled itself at him before he could raise his sword and the three fell backwards into the dirt, wrestling for supremacy.

“Maliq!”

His kidney spike was gone. The closest object to hand was a fallen candelabra. Instinct alone made Abana grab and bash open the skull of the creature writhing on top of his lover’s sword. The blow cracked its cranium like an egg and splattered its effluvium over his face; sodden grey matter pickled with marrow. Maliq shoved the corpse off his breastplate. Its red eyes went dark again.

“Abana! Stay behind me!”

Maliq shouted this as two more ghouls shambled towards them from left and right. This time he did not wait for them to attack – he threw himself at them. Abana stared in awe as the former Bloodshield cut through the creatures of the underworld with his grandfather’s glittering blade. The severed remnants of a dishonoured nobility; rib bones and skull fragments and broken thoraxes; floated through the rank air like threshed wheat.

Bony fingers slapped around Abana’s mouth.

It was Rahab – not his ghouls.

Only one Ghoul remained to battle Maliq as the sorcerer dragged his former slave off into a secluded corridor of the mausoleum. Abana tried to scream but his throat was too weak, he tried to wriggle free but even half-dead Rahab was so much larger and stronger than he was. The sorcerer shoved him against a wall so hard it knocked the breath from his lungs – then opened his palm and summoned more of his magical flame. Abana’s body flushed with pale light as Rahab’s magic lifted him into the air and held him fast.

“I will drain every drop of energy from your body,” spat Rahab. “Your life essence will keep me alive until I find an antidote for your damned poison…”

“RAHAB!”

Two sudden and powerful slashes cut open the governor’s cassock and sliced deep into the muscles of his back. The old man screamed. Blood hit the walls and the floor in streaks. The white light in his hand disappeared, as did the white light surrounding Abana’s body. The Kushwari boy felt himself fall out of the air and crash into a burial urn that exploded into fragments and ash. He hacked and wheezed, unable to move at all, as the man he _loved_ most in the world faced the one he **hated** most. 

Rahab climbed back onto his feet. Blood streamed down his back from open wounds. “How… dare you…! How DARE you defy me! I am your MASTER!”

“We are our own masters now!” Yelled Maliq. “It ends here, Rahab! Once and for all!”

The sorcerer raised up his sword as that burning white fire enveloped its broad blade. “…Perhaps for you and your little whore, you loathsome Jafari mongrel… but this is not _my_ end… now DIE!”

Even with his back carved open and glutting with blood. Even with the bitterblack poison creeping through his organs. Even with the corpuscular degeneration that caused Kafnak to break faith with their pact – Rahab of Mahmun still had enough strength in his haggard body to leap forward with that burning sword and rain blow after blow at Maliq’s defences. He fought with a rage of a man denied. He shrieked with fury with every slash and thrust as the Jamaran fended off his blows. Sparks danced off their clashing blades and lit up the blackened corridor as Rahab forced Maliq backwards into the mausoleum.

_Maliq_. When Abana opened his burning eyes all he saw was black ash. _Maliq_. They streamed with tears when he scrubbed them clean, but he could see… and he saw his love being pushed back by his hated former master. _Maliq_. Abana rolled off his back onto his belly. The broken shards of painted pottery gouged his skin, but he was barely aware of it even as he bled from them. _Maliq_. Abana fought his way onto his feet even as his whip wounds scorched with agony beneath the binds Maliq tied. It did not matter. His body did not matter – he just needed to get up. Abana dug his nails into the wall and hauled himself upright. Sweat dripped down his nose and brow as he then padded along and followed the claps of clashing metal echoing in the distance.

All around them the walls of the mausoleum were shaking. Numerous cracks broke into the domed ceiling and spat streams of sand. Smoke from the burning fires above seeped into the mausoleum and its chambers. The Elephant Palace would be a mound of rubble before sunrise. Yet Rahab fought on and on like a man possessed, battering away at Jahanshah. With each strike Maliq’s stance lost more of its form, his arms and legs shaking at each impact, his reserves of strength whittling away…

…and then Rahab stopped.

The governor fell to his knees. Breathless. His shoulders heaved. His bony breast punched in and out with his every racing breath. And then his mouth gaped open as his guts vomited up a sickly gout of blood, bile and undigested fish.

“…P-Poison…” muttered Rahab.

Maliq caught his breath as Rahab slowly lost his. Abana fought through the mist of blood loss to keep his eyes open. That was how he was still able to see it when Maliq weakly lifted his sword and thrust forward. One last charge whilst the sorcerer was down.

Jahanshah flew through the dust and smoke. Half-cataracted eyes rolled up in their sockets. They caught it, the sight of it, that flash of steel warping through the air, and Rahab thrust out his longer arm in response. Maliq’s whole body jerked back as Rahab plunged his flaming sword into the warrior’s chest.

Abana’s heart sank.

“NOOOOOO!”

The paladin’s blade Jahanshah fell out a limp hand. A pair of kind eyes, the colour of almonds, rolled into the back of a skull. Noble blood flowed down a thick blade embedded in a fragile iron breastplate… and Abana of Hafiz watched helplessly as his lover, Khamali Maliq Moromaya, slumped dead upon the mausoleum floor.


	10. The Swordsman and the Dancer

(Mid-Winter, 1179)

Abana watched Maliq sleep.

The tavern was affordable, only 10 silverlings per person per night. All they needed was one night. Eleven days had elapsed since they first left Iblyd… which meant that King Qattullah was only nine days shy of Tehraq. Though they still had some time left… there was not much of it. Even so, he wanted Maliq to enjoy a comfortable bed and good food for a change. Riding through the night and sleeping through the day took its toll over time. It was more Abana’s idea than Maliq’s, and there was a decided risk to it considering what they had done, but the older man seemed to enjoy it more. The food was good (seasoned mince and flatbread – as good as it smelt on that day) and the bed was feathered.

The dancer slipped out from the covers, naked and sweat-soaked from lovemaking, as his companion slept. He padded over to a window girded with Kushwari-style latticework and beyond the glass he bore witness to the headman’s household. Unlike two years ago it flew only one flag – the Winged Lion of the Tehraqi Kings. Save for that… Tangrys was unchanged from when last Abana was there.

_('Keep your wits about you')_ Its streets were calm that night. No brigands. No drunks. No barking dogs. Just a typical borderland village. Was it not admirable? Was it not… fit for a reward? _(‘The Kushwari are a mountain people, pale-skinned and acclimated to the cold. Why do you think those black-skinned Jafaris sell for a higher price at market?’)_ Abana supposed, in the more playful sense of his vengeance, that such disciplined village life should be acknowledged. That was why he sent the headman of Tangrys a lovely bottle of date wine to enjoy for the night. _(‘Bypassing Qasr Ghazna means going without water for at least three days. How many of your slaves will survive that?’)_

Abana’s increasingly cold eyes wandered beyond the household to the Pushan Mountains looming darky over the village. In three days, someone would sound the town bells and word would spread like wildfire through Tangrys that its headsman was dead, joining his good friend Hakkan the Slaver in the grave – but it mattered not. By then he and Maliq would have already crossed over those mountains into his cold homeland, Kushwar.

For now?

He was content to watch Maliq sleep.

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

Abana watched Maliq fall. His armour clanked beneath his weight as he toppled into the dust with Rahab’s ignited sword still jammed into his chest. The flames ebbed away as the blood began to spurt and the swordsman fell still. Abana, heartbroken, dropped to his knees.

“…He is… gone…”

His lover. His friend. His protector. His Maliq.

“…Gone…”

Just like that.

His murderer, Rahab of Mahmun, finally caught his breath. Blood drenched the back of his cassock whilst his vomitus befouled the front. The magical flames around his fist grew paler and less intense. Only then did he notice the ceiling above him. It was ready to _burst_. The cracks above grew longer with each moment as the tiles fell and the frescos broke off in shattered fragments. Thickets of black smoke rolled across the ground and the fires had spread to each hallway bearing east of the central chamber.

Rahab climbed to his feet.

“My palace is in ruins… all my research reduced to ash… nothing remains to mourn,” he clutched a weak fist. “...All that is left to me… is the bounty of Yahvat Yahva…”

_You. Will. Never. See. It. Rahab. Of. Mahmun._

The sorcerer froze.

“…My god,” he uttered. “My god…”

Raging light exploded into the mausoleum like thunder from the heavens. The light was so bright it singed the crypt stones as it flooded the corridors and each of its chambers. Not even Rahab could see through it – not until it slowly receded to its source.

…Maliq.

Both Abana and Rahab gazed dumbfounded as the golden-white magical energies swelled down and reverted into his fallen body. The blood drenching his breastplate oozed backwards into the flesh whence it came. Maliq’s fingers twitched as those swirling magical energies gently pulled Rahab’s sword out of his chest and hurled it across the chamber.

His eyes opened.

And a blood-eyed white shadow charred the dust beneath it as it materialized behind Maliq’s back.

“Kafnak…” Rahab dropped to his knees. There was no fight left in him after that. “…oh god. Oh lord my god. Why? Why have you forsaken me…?”

Maliq, silent and fierce-eyed, opened his gauntleted hand and Jahanshah flew into it. Rahab did not move to stop him as the Jamaran man climbed back onto his feet and closed the gap between them with a few quiet steps.

Maliq raised Jahanshah…

…and Abana watched him decapitate Rahab with it. The sorcerer’s torso fell into the dust as his woollen-jawed head rolled away into the piling rubble.

“…Maliq…?” Abana quivered. “…My love…?”

Kafnak’s blood-eyed shadow seared behind him as he opened his hand and summoned something into it – the Tome of the Ancients. Its cover opened of its own accord and its pages flipped to a simple spell he incanted in a tone and tongue beyond the realms of the known.

And then everything stopped.

The rumbles stopped. The fires stopped. The smoke stopped. The rubble stopped falling and the dust stopped swirling, the urns stopped breaking and the walls stopped shaking.

Everything stopped.

Abana watched everything around him pause in an instant – _as if the tides of time themselves had frozen over_. He glanced across the silenced chaos of that half-destroyed mausoleum to his beloved Khamali Maliq Moromaya… and knew in his heart…

_(‘This is all my fault…’_ )

“Abana, you were right…” said Maliq regretfully, Jahanshah in one hand and the Tome of Ancients in the other. “…There was just… no other way.”

_(‘No! Maliq!’)_

Time restarted.

The rumbles resumed. The fires raged. The smoke bloomed. The debris streamed like snowfall. The last thing Abana of Hafiz saw (and the last thing he remembered) was Kafnak’s evil shadow enveloping the man he loved as the ground beneath his feet liquefied and sank through it. Arcane powers pulled Abana through a maelstrom of time and motion until the binds of space and matter caught up to them – and shunted his body back into the throes of the empirical. Abana landed inside Baelik’s haycart in the sweltering streets of Tehraq, barely 300 paces shy of the raging inferno demolishing the Elephant Palace. He would not wake for another eight hours.

And he dreamt of love.

* * *

(Mid-Winter, 1179)

Little had changed. Those were the thoughts of Abana of Hafiz as he laid eyes upon the goat farm once again. It was two and some years ago since he was first lured away from it amid a dusky gloom and _almost_ _nothing had changed_. That makeshift mule stable still leaked from its thatched roof. The slapdash paddock where once they reared half-a-hundred mountain goats was empty and overridden with weeds from lack of grazing. The charred ruins of the main house (which burned to cinders in his formative years) still sat in a blackened rubble of ironwood and stone. And its servant quarters? That tiny mudbrick house that a young boy named Abana ibn Tawab once called home? It too remained. Lack of maintenance cracked its yellow walls and left its broken roofing smattered with rain sludge and bird shit. Rainfall transformed turned its footpath into a muddy sludge. But… extraordinarily little had changed.

Abana’s restless mare whickered beneath him as he observed it all – the young girl was not used to the cold. Maliq was saddled beside him upon his own horse.

“Abana,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this? There is no shame in turning back – we only have six days left to beat Qattullah to Tehraq.”

The dancer dreamt of coming back… almost every day since he left. Some nights he dreamt of simply waking up in his pallet and skipping out into the garden to see a whole field of goats ready for them to herd. Sometimes he returned to see his home in flames, defiled by the screams of the dying. Sometimes he simply dreamt that he never left. But coming back…

_‘Nothing has changed…’_ he thought. “You know my heart better than anyone, my love. Do you think I could live with myself knowing that I came this far, this close… to not even knock the door?”

Maliq sighed.

“No,” he said. “I do not think you would.”

Abana dismounted. Maliq followed suit and pulled _Lion’s Claw_ free from his mare’s harness. They tied their horse’s reins to a nearby cedar stump and walked across the pebble-strewn grass to the property. Maliq banged the door with his fist and stepped back.

Abana took a deep breath as he overheard footsteps from within. The creaking plank-wood door unbolted and swung open and there he was: hunched over and haggard, balding yet unshaven. Dirt crusted his skin in patches of brown and black, his eyes sunken into their sockets and encircled by darkened flesh. Those tired eyes brightened with shock as Abana removed his hood.

“A-Abana…?” An empty water bucket fell from the hands of Tawab ibn Shahab and clattered to the ground. His son eyed him darkly, but the father did not notice. He was too stunned. Tawab (mouth agape) reached out to touch him, as if to prove to himself that the man he now saw was real, and Abana slapped his hand away.

“Abana…?”

Maliq shoved Tawab inside the homestead. The old Kushwari stumbled backwards on a lame leg and tripped over the bucket he dropped. An expressionless Abana slammed the door shut and locked it. Tawab fell onto his ribs with an ugly thud and begged Abana to “wait!” as the boy unspooled a leather whip from his cloak folds. It was a stolen gift from the man his father sold him to whilst he scrambled to coral his men at the Ziggurat of Mnenomon. It was stained with slave’s blood.

Abana shrieked with fury as he lashed his father with it. Strike after strike rained down upon his body, each crack cutting open his robes and flesh. Blood smattered the straw-covered ground as a yelping Tawab scrambled to cover up his head.

“I had no choice!” Blood slipped out his mouth as he whimpered. “I had no choice…!” 

“Liar…” Abana thrashed his ankles this time. Maliq winced as a scrap of flesh tore from the bone. “LIAR! You _always_ had a choice! Where is my mother? WHERE IS SHE!?”

Tawab yelled for the boy to stop.

Abana only stopped lashing him when his whip arm was too tired to continue. He caught his breath, eyes and nostrils flaring, as he watched Tawab shiver, bloody and battered, in a foetal position. His clothes were in tatters. Abana eyed him with disgust – this was not the fearsome pater of his childhood and his nightmares. This was not the man who froze his spine when he sharpened his eyes or raised his voice. The Tawab ibn Shahab who sold him to slavers was not the one cowering on the ground today. This Tawab just… cried.

Abana cracked the whip again.

“Where is she…?” He said.

Tawab pointed a shaky finger at the pantry. Abana dropped the whip and stormed through its curtain door into the derelict kitchen. The cooking pit’s coals were dead. Tin pots and wooden spoons still hung from its walls. The spice jars were cracked and empty. But no Paja.

The yard door was ajar though.

Abana shoved it open and stepped outside into the fenced clearing where past rainfalls had washed away the pasture and transformed it into a pebbly mud-land. And there, at the foot of his father’s leafless butchering tree, rested his mother’s gravestone.

_Paja bint Fouzan_

_(1136 – 1178)_

_Rendered unto the gods_

It was a misshapen slab with its inscription crudely carved in old Kushwari lettering. Tawab probably went to the cheapest stonemason in Hafiz for it. Even in _death_ he had no respect for her.

“Mother…” Abana wept. “…I came home.”

As the skies darkened above, he thumbed the tears out of his eyes and said a prayer. Not for himself (for the gods never seemed to hear his prayers) but for his mother. He prayed for the safety of her soul and hoped that the underworld was a kinder place than the overworld.

When he returned to the hovel, he found Tawab sat upon his haunches, bleeding and bruised. Maliq kept a wary hand upon _Lion’s Claw_ but there was no need. Abana saw that now. Tawab was a broken man. He had no fight left in him. He had _nothing_ left… except Jahanshah. The dancer eyed his grandfather’s glittering sword still rested on the mantlepiece. He lost everything any sane man could want; his household, his herd, his child, and his wife… but not that sword. Not that last gilded emblem of a forgotten greatness.

Abana knelt to meet him at eye-level. “…Did she know? Was she part of it?”

Tawab shook his head _no_. “I told her after I came home that morning… and she never forgave me.”

“…How did she die?”

“…In her sleep. Peacefully.”

That was a lie. Abana could not say _how_ he knew it, but he _knew_ it. There were no peaceful ends in this world, particularly not for the quiet and the virtuous. The dancer envisioned a Tawab too deep in his cups to govern his fists one day. Perhaps Paja spoke out of turn? Or perhaps she fought back? Either way the result was the same. Abana imagined the bastard telling himself little lies to justify it… that it was an _accident_ or that she _pushed_ him to it. Yet still he would not sell the sword – not even to give her a proper burial.

Abana hated his father.

But as he looked at him now, withered and broken, he took no pleasure from the sight. Only loathing. The world _overflowed_ with bastards like Tawab ibn Shahab and its was always women like Paja or children like Abana who suffered for it. A kinder person might see the scene unfolding in that wretched little hovel and implore him to stay his hand, tell him that Tawab was already beaten, that it was for the gods to punish him now. But kind people are idiots and some people _deserve to die_.

“I used to _dream_ of this day,” Tawab stilled as his son drew his kidney spike from its sheath, “…and of _all_ the self-righteous speeches I would say before I ended you… Failed man. Failed husband. Failed father. But you are not worth one more word or breath.”

Abana cut his throat.

No screams. No tears. No regrets.

The son watched with unfazed eyes as the father slowly and torturously choked to death on his own blood.

* * *

(Late Winter, 1179)

When Abana opened his eyes, he saw a familiar sight – a row of paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling beams of his quarters at the Sanguine Vigil. He was home – not that he remembered the journey back. Baelik, Lady Yahya’s Tehraqi inside man, wheeled him across the city from the flaming ruins of the Elephant Palace to his stables on the other side of the Kazara River. His head was still woozy from the smoke fumes so he remembered little of being smuggled out of the city, just brief flashes of memory – stumbling out of the haycart down a footpath, sloshing around in the murky waters of a sewer, Baelik helping him climb out of a crack in a large wall, and watching the desert sands idle away from a camel hump. That was all he recalled of his escape… and then he woke up here.

Abana (gingerly) leaned upright. Someone treated the whip wounds across his back whilst he slept, first washing then binding them in fresh cotton dressings. They still hurt him but not as badly as before… the pain was more of a dull throb. Whoever treated him also applied herbal healing balms to the bruises on his thighs, and lit jars of incense to help relax his muscles.

Lady Yahya sat upon the edge of his bed.

“You are awakened,” she said. “This is good.”

Abana said nothing.

“…You have been asleep for nearly three days. Do you realize that?” She asked.

Abana looked away and said nothing.

The governess frowned. “The Elephant Palace is a smoking ruin. Tehraq is in lockdown and I cannot help but notice that Maliq is nowhere to be seen. You _must_ tell me what happened.”

He asked for some water first.

Lady Yahya had her attendant (a Xianese foundling named Liang) pour him a cup from a nearby ewer. Abana thanked her and drank it slowly. It did not go down well. His throat remained sore and chalky from the smoke.

“…I lied to you,” admitted Abana. He handed the cup back to Liang, who then excused herself. “When Maliq and I left for Tehraq it was not merely to kill Rahab.”

Lady Yahya frowned. “ _I know_. You did not go directly to Qazyr to await Dhabr as I ordered… you went to the Ziggurat of Mnenomon whose head slave tamer is now dead... rumour has it from poison. Then next you went to the border town of Tangrys whose headman is now dead… rumour has it from poison. Then after some detour across the Kushwari border you returned to carry out my instructions and convene with Dhabr, who is now dead… rumour has it from poison. And need I mention Governor Ganu? Dead… rumour has it from _poison_.”

_‘She had us followed?’_ Abana thought ruefully. _‘Why am I surprised?_ “…I will not apologize.”

“Apologies are wind,” said the governess. “I want the _truth_ , Abana. All of it.”

With that he gave it to her. All of it. He told her about Hakkan the Slaver, the headman of Tangrys, Tawab ibn Shabab, and Dhabr the Merchant and why he killed them. He explained the governor’s plot to smuggle him into the Elephant Palace in the place of a Kushwari dancer for the King’s banquet. He explained how he met up with Maliq inside the palace before they were intercepted by guards – that Rahab’s god Kafnak proposed a bargain that he refused – a bargain that Maliq accepted in his place.

“You say that Maliq… made truck with Kafnak? And what obsession would he have for that creature to feed upon?”

“…Who knows?” The despondency in Abana’s voice was like a stone sinking into dark waters. “Protecting me, perhaps? Revenge against the king? I… do not know. What of Tehraq?”

At that Lady Yahya chuckled ruefully. But Abana asked the question largely for _her_ benefit. He could care less if the entire damn city burned to cinders.

“With two dead governors and the Elephant Palace destroyed, Tehraq’s gates were sealed on King Qattullah’s orders. He’s also summoned to the remaining governors to the Sun Court, a gathering which I will have to attend. Fortunately for us this whole debacle is being viewed as some sort of power dispute between Rahab and Ganu… and neither are alive to tell the tale. The expedition to Yahvat Yahva is moot. History’s course has been steered in a better direction.”

_‘And for what?’_ Abana thought. Rahab was dead. Tawab was too. Hakkan, Dhabr, Ganu and the headman of Tangrys all gone. But what victory was there to enjoy without Maliq there by his side? What was the worth of settling the debts of the past if he lost the man with whom he sought to build his future? 

Lady Yahya placed a book on the bed. It was the Tome of the Ancients.

“W-what is _this_ doing here?” He asked.

“Baelik found it in his haycart,” said the governess. “If Maliq used Kafnak’s magic to save you from the fire… perhaps he sent this book with you so that you could use it to save _him_.”

_(‘Maliq…’)_

“I owe Maliq much. If this is the only tool at our disposal to save him then you have my permission to use it. But magic is _not_ something to be trifled with, Abana. If either of you are consumed by dark powers… you become as much my enemy as Rahab of Mahmun was. Do you understand?”

Her eyes were grey as steel. It was no bluff. Though nothing Lady Yahya said surprised Abana, it still bothered him to hear her state it so coldly. Maliq was right about her (as he was about many a thing). Honour and generosity aside she was a Tehraqi to her core.

“I understand,” said the dancer.

Lady Yahya nodded. “…Very well. I leave it to you to decide if you wish to use it. Take this time to rest… but before you do… one last gift.”

The Governess of Jawwaz clapped her hands. Abana’s chamber door opened in response and a cloaked figure walked into his rooms awash with the scent of jasmine. Abana eyed the stranger cynically… until she lowered her hood.

“…How cold your eyes grow, Abana…” She said softly. “Just as you return my smile to me.”

The boy gasped. “…Hamami!”

* * *

(Mid-Winter, 1179)

Abana of Hafiz took Jahanshah with him to pray for his mother one last time. He laid their ancestral sword before her misshapen gravestone beneath the black shade of the butchering tree then sat and closed his eyes. And when he did, he pictured Paja as she once was – dignified, kind and resilient. The sun had peaked when Maliq came to check on him. He must have lost track of time at some point.

The Jamaran came to sit behind the Kushwari and protectively wove his arms around him. Abana melted into the embrace. Tear tracks soured his dimples.

“My mother was one of the few people who ever treated me with real kindness,” whispered Abana. “When I was a slave, I made myself forget about this place… because thinking about it was just too painful. Was I wrong?”

“No,” said Maliq.

“What would she make of me now, I wonder? Her son turned plaything of the Tehraqi nobility? Assassin?” 

“Look at me,” Maliq took Abana’s chin between his thumb and forefinger. “I believe she would see what I see – a _survivor_. You have avenged her. Perhaps now her soul can rest in peace.”

The tears welled in Abana’s eyes again. Not because of Maliq (never because of him) but because he knew he would never come back here again. Though he loathed to leave her buried so ignobly, there was nothing further he could do for his mother except pray for the gods to deliver her deserving soul to a happier plane.

Abana nuzzled his face into Maliq’s neck like a kitten and smiled to himself about what the future might hold for him and man within whose arms he dwelt.

“Take the sword,” said Abana.

Maliq eyed Jahanshah’s golden presence. “You told me that sword is the pride of your family.”

“You _are_ my family,” said Abana. “Take it.”

His other sword _Lion’s Claw_ sat hung heavily from his desert mare’s saddle alongside the roped and blanketed corpse of Tawab ibn Shahab (who they would leave for the crows on their way back through the Pushan Mountains), but he would not refuse. Maliq took Jahanshah by its glittering scabbard and brought it to his side. Only two were left to die – Dhabr the Slaver and Rahab of Mahmun. Once they were gone…

“Just a few more days,” said Maliq.

Abana smiled. “…And then our life begins.”

* * *

(Early Spring, 1180)

This time around Steedmaster Yuza chose a hardier horse for Abana of Hafiz; a powerful russet-maned beast named _Hauras_. He then had his apprentice outfit Hauras with his custom designed saddle and harnesses. It was a placid creature (gelded and well-trained) and despite Abana not having much opportunity to ride it, Yuza assured him it would get him to where he wanted to go safely. Reliability rather than speed was of the essence for in truth he had no idea how long this would take – all he had to go by was faith and all he had to go _with_ was a sturdy, loyal steed.

Hauras was waiting for him in the stables of the Sanguine Vigil. Abana fed it with an apple before loading the saddlebags with his provisions – enough food for three days as well as two waterskins, an extra cloak and robes, a spool of rope, medicinal herbs, and ointments. Hidden within the folds of his gold-trimmed black doublet was a new kidney spike produced by the forgemaster. He had the blade made just a ¼ of a cubit long, with a sleeker grip and no quillion – assuring a faster thrust. Abana opened his cloak and withdrew it, unsheathing the blade. It was so sharp and clean he could see his own reflection in it. It was a fine piece of work.

It would probably save his life one day.

Abana hid it within his doublet again.

Then, as the oasis town of Iblyd slumbered beneath the lunar rays of Mut, the Kushwari boy took Hauras by the reins and led him out of the stables where he found Lady Yahya waiting for him. She stood beneath one of the swaying fronds of the palm trees bulwarking the footpath from the stables to the Vigil’s gates. There were no guards with her – which meant that she was here to talk.

“My lady,” Abana sighed. “Have you come to dissuade me?”

She shook her head.

“All who are under my helm are my family, Abana, including you and Maliq. That is why I grant you my resources. Never forget that.”

_‘And yet if I fail, you’ll have us both killed,’_ thought Abana cynically. “I will not. I thank you.”

The Governess frowned. “Will you not say goodbye to your friends at least?”

Nothing about the chaos at the Elephant Palace concerned him save for Rahab’s death… and the safe deliverance of the Silk Court. When Hamami came to visit Abana during his recovery she explained how Maliq freed her and the others before he set the fires around the palace. They escaped into the tunnels beneath the mausoleum and re-emerged in the streets of Tehraq alongside Yahya’s man, Baelik, whose contacts smuggled them out of the city and escorted them to Iblyd. In the intervening weeks, the governess had put them into her employ – Hamami and Zanza were her new court performers, Li her personal attendant and Roswyn her new herbalist. They were free women now.

But Abana could not bear to see them again.

“I missed them,” he said. Hauras whickered against its reins. It was restless at the sight of the moon, as it was trained to be. It wanted to leave – as did Abana. “But every time I look into their eyes, I am spirited back to that time… I yearn for the day I can look upon my sisters and _not_ be reminded of what was done to us… but that day has not yet arrived.”

Lady Yahya nodded. “Well, rest assured they are safe under my charge. Where will you go?”

“Back to Tehraq,” With a single leap Abana heaved himself up onto the saddle, his cloak whipping about his shoulders. Hauras neighed beneath him. “Kafnak feeds on obsession, which Maliq will have to indulge. With me safe I can only suspect he will pursue King Qattullah – revenge for his queen, Hamra lo’a Daiira.”

Lady Yahya frowned. “…A well-deserved death no doubt… but assassinating the king could destabilize the entire High East…”

“I know,” Abana said. “But it will not come to that. I _will_ save him… and I will do it my way.”

The Tome of the Ancients sat inside one of the saddlebags. Lady Yahya blinked as Abana respectfully returned it to her. “Here.”

“You will not use it?”

Abana shook his head. “The man I love is out there somewhere in thrall to the dark forces that a madman once unleashed with that book. I will not allow myself to become what Rahab of Mahmun was… neither myself not Maliq. _No more magic_.”

The governess pulled a slow smile. She understood that he had to do this his own way. He would not travel with a guard nor employ any sorcerous skulduggery. He would save the man he loved and bring an end to it – and seize that distant life they always dreamed of. 

“I wish you luck,” she said.

Abana smiled back softly. “Thank you, my lady, and keep safe. We _will_ return to you. Safely.”

**********

(Late Winter, 1179)

The Tehraqis had a crude term for copulation. They called it riding the camel – predictably garish for a city-state of stargazers, merchants, and cutthroats. The Kushwaris on the other hand, at least those of a certain breeding and social stock, they knew it by a much more elegant name – the Dance of Flesh.

How many years had Abana of Hafiz danced? How many partners had he danced with? It galled him to admit that he lost count many, many dances ago. He barely even remembered their names – but he remembered their faces. The mole-eyed boy and the jowly spearman; the fat merchant and the pale-skinned guildsman; the nervous bookkeeper and the gold-toothed baker; the lord’s minstrel and the exiled chieftain. The drunk charioteer. The one-armed executioner. The governor’s sons. All had had their turn in countless times and contexts. He hated them. And he would never forget any of them. Maybe their names… but never their faces.

Cruel men made Abana dance before he even knew what dancing was. Cruel men tempered him like steel to cater to their ilk, to crave their touch, to covet spilt seed like some precious reward – and the cruellest man of all nearly succeeded.

Abana learned to hate the dance.

The pain of it, the shame of it, the sweat and the smells, the moans, and the growls; the unwanted ecstasy you clung to like flotsam to moor you through it. Abana thought he might always hate the dance... if not for the man he danced with now.

Maliq.

It was as though the gods sculpted a man from finest marble and brought him to life by the breath of their essence – solely for Abana’s sake. The boy adored every inch of the man; his hair like thick ebon whorls, his deep jade eyes and smooth bronze skin, those broad shoulders and muscular frame… and his unflinchingly kind heart.

Yes, Abana had no idea how wonderful the Dance of Flesh could truly be until he chose Maliq as his partner. And he was so lost in the dance that lusty night (in one of the many cushioned tents of Dhabr’s caravan) that he almost missed the little spy peeling back the curtain door and poking an inquisitive eye inside. Abana watched the spy as the spy watched him bounce up and down off Maliq’s thick hips and all eight inches of his girth. And then Abana smiled at him.

The boy blushed and ran away.

So far as anyone knew Maliq was only his guard, and until they reached Tehraq, that was the way it had to remain. _‘I’m going to have to kill you, little one,’_ thought Abana. _‘But not until I finish my dance…’_

**********

END

**********

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * Thanks for reading, everybody! I'm currently working on updates on some of my older stories and get them finished (I had to take a long hiatus from writing because I started a new job), so please keep a look out for them! ^_^


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